Backup Solution using Veeam?

[INEFOP2013]

Hi there,

First of all, i'm sorry for my poor english writing skills. I hope you can understand me.

We are planning to use Veeam Backup as our backup solution and I recieved a proposal from a member of the IT team.

Currently, we have an only ESXi host with some VM's installed, MS and Linux. Our intention is using that hardware only, creating a VM for each server we need.

The proposal is; virtualize the Backup Server in the same hardware. I never applied such a solution and it makes me doubt about it.

I did always use a different hardware to take control of the backup tasks.

Could this proposal work properly or it's not recommended? And why?

I'll appreciate the answers.

Thanks!

[admin]

Yes that should be fine... But as a best practice , backup should have been managed separately if for some reason the storage on which these VMs being managed is corrupted...

[snekkalapudi]

You can have VM level protection and point in time recovery of your VMs sitting on the host as long as the host is not failed. If the host is failed, it is a single point of failure and no ways you can recover your VMs as your backup appliance is down.

[ldelloca]

Hi,

saving the backups in the same infrastructure you are protecting is a mojor design errors, and I've seen even large corporations giving too much trust in their storage by thinking it cannot fail since it has some degree of redundancy.

My two cents: design for fail! Think as everything in your infrastructure can break, and design a backup system that can help you survice the most common disaster scenario.

Since you have a single ESXi host and you are planning to use Veeam, also consider their Replication capabilities and to introduce a second ESXi server to replicate VMs to. This can help you reduce downtime when a problem happens to the production ESXi servers. Backups are useless if you do not have another ESXi server to restore them to.

Luca.

[mrlesmithjr]

Have a read at the link provided below on some ideas and then feel free to post back to the forums here on any questions or concerns and we can all help you out here.

http://everythingshouldbevirtual.com/veeam-thoughts