vSphere Data Protection data flow

[rbaldauf225]

Looking to set up VDP and want to make sure I do so in the best way possable. I have a sphere/view enviroment with a couple of ESXi servers on our private network. ALso have a PHYSICAL box for vCenter and a PHYSICAL box for veiw.

1. If I put VDP on an existing ESXi, and have the VDP storage on the same san as the VMs will it copy entirely within the SAN or will it move all data through the VDP and back to SAN (uping utilisatin of both the already crowdes iSCSI connection and increasing read / write ops on the san itself)?

2. If I put VPD on its own dedicated ESXi server with local storage and dedicated iSCSI connectin to SAN, will all data move straight from SAN to VDP and be stored, or will it go through each VMs ESXI server and travel over the private network to the VPD?

If anyone can help me understand how data moves to be backed up, I would appreciate it.

Thanks,

Robb

[snekkalapudi]

Hi,

Your option-1 is good as long as you have enough resources(CPU & memory) on ESXi.

Look at the VDP resource requirements in admin guide(4 GB RAM & 4 vCPU)

All backup traffic should be within SAN. Also VDP leverages SCSI hot-add if your datastore is shared across the ESXi hosts.

[rbaldauf225]

So even though de-dup is performed, the information is not moved across the iSCSI link for the VDP to read and then wright to the backup area of the san? How is this possible? I would think the IOs by VDP would use up all of the bandwidth in the SAN slowing IO of my VMs to a crawl.

[rbaldauf225]

"will it copy entirely within the SAN" should read "will it copy entirely within the SHARED DISK"