VDP Appliance Network Placement

[MZirbes]

Currently my VDP appliance is in the Virtual Machine Network. Based on the VDP appliance architechture and the way it performs backups, what is the best/most efficent VLAN to place the appliance in? Should I move it to the Storage or VMotion networks? Where is the backup traffic occuring?

I have 4 vlans configured.

VLAN10 - Virtual Machine Network

VLAN20 - VMKernel for Storage

VLAN30 - VMKernel for Vmotion

VLAN40 - VMKernel for Management

Thanks for your help.

[admin]

By default your VDP VM will be in VM network.. Your backup traffic will pass depending on the transport method: Hot-add Transport   You can think of hot-add transport as a special case of SAN transport where the backup host is also a virtual machine. Plus there is a bonus, it works for non-SAN data stores as well. The backup host VM accesses the VMDK objects of other VMs directly from the data store (similar to SAN transport). It can protect all VMs on datastores to which it has access. Pros:   No need for a physical backup host   Does provide offhost backups for those VMs not collocated with VM backup host   The most efficient backup method for NFS based data stores (e.g. NetApp or FileStore providing VM storage) Cons:   It does use ESX server resources where the VM backup host is deployed   You cannot protect VMDK files larger than 1TB (a vADP limitation with hot-add) NBD Transport   NBD stands for network block device. In this method, VMware Network File Copy (NFC) protocol is used such that the VMDK object looks like a block device to the backup host which can be read through network. You need one NFC connection for each VMDK file being backed up. Thus backup is streamed from ESX/ESXi system’s VMkernel port to VMware backup host. If your ESX/ESXi hosts have VMKernel ports (known as the management ports) with dedicated uplinks, your virtual machine traffic links are not affected. Pros:   Works for all kinds of data stores, even the ones directly attached (DAS) to ESX hosts   The simplest one to setup from infrastructure perspective works with both physical and virtual backup hosts. Cons:   Not an offhost solution.  ESX resources are used for backups.