I am about to change our backup storation solution for our virtualized environmnet. I have a few options but one that seems more suited for us is to marry the veem backup with a ReadyNAS 4220. I have about 11 VMs that i need backed up totaling about 8T of space. I am was hoping i could get some information on this particula setup related to performance and setup. If anyone has experience with this setup, i would greatly appreciate any info.
Hi. I have lots of experience running Veeam against ReadyNAS OS 6.
My recommendation is create a thick iSCSI LUN no larger than 80% of the total volume space. Turn off bit rot protection, turn off snapshots, turn off sync writes. Mount the iSCSI LUN to your machine running Veeam.
Only use the NAS for Veeam and not other backups.
Schedule volume maintenance: defrag for Saturday mornings and balance for Sunday mornings to keep the file system healthy. Make sure these run when the unit is not doing backups.
Thanks much for your reply. I was under the impression that altought the new appliances don't have LUN size limiations, the local OS will not allow larger sizes then 8T. The one I am looking is the 3220S series readynas. I plan on using the readyNAS just for DR. However, I have a fileserver that i need to keep several weeks of backup. I know Veem does granulary backup but will it sync correctly? And finally, sounds like a full time job to maintain the appliance for a DR solution. Can you provide more information as to why I should warry about the volume maintenance and system health? I do it anyway with my vcenter but I was hoping for more of a "set it an forget it" option.
From our Release notes: ReadyNAS 102, 104, and 2120 only support creating iSCSI LUNs 8TB and smaller.
ReadyNAS 3220 supports creating larger than 8 TB iSCSI LUNs. NTFS supports 256 TB total FS size. Pick 64KB block size when formatting.
When you buy yours, upgrade to the latest firmware and factory default again on the latest to make sure you take advantage of all the latest benefits of a fresh filesystem.
Can you help me understand what "sync correctly" means?
Disaster Recovery is a fulltime job 😛 You should always test backups regularly to ensure they're of good quality and even have backups of backups. (Putting all your backups on one system is not a backup).
The underlying file system in ReadyNAS OS 6 is btrfs, which is a copy on write file system. The write patterns are important for continued success. The file system can accumulate a large number of extents on your iSCSI LUN. The volume maintenance helps keeps these extent numbers small (good number is between 1 and 10). Realistically, your iSCSI LUN could get as large as 1,000,000 extents, which would not only consume more than a terabyte of fragmentation but could leave your backup server crippled and operating extremely slow, something you don't want your backup server.
Volume maintence is schedulable from the UI, which is like a set it and forget it option you use in vCenter.
Thanks again for your quick reply. Agreed with most. My biggest fear is having to marry two items that perhaps were not meant for each other. Much like my marriage:)
For example, Veem uses vss to stop temporary services to take a quick vm snapshot. This snapshot is than transferred to the storage (more or less). That is nice when all you want is vm backup. However, I have a 1 ½ T fileserver that veem will do granularly backup. This means I will have to do dedupping inside the vm. I know veem recommends such large blocks to be backed up on the local disk. However replication has to take place to move data from production storage to readyNAS. (Perhaps I shouldn’t have but here is where I was referring to sync). I am not convinced that veem will do this with readyNAS effectively. It takes serious horse power to perform this task. After all the 3220S is a JBOD. Since you mentioned I should use the readyNAS just for the vm backups, should I put the fileserver backup elsewhere?
Glad to know that the 3220S will support larger block LUNs.
In the old days DR was. But if it becomes a full time job now, then something is wrong. I don’t know how often others are doing DR recovery. Obviously depends on the business critical, systems mission critical but more so on the budget.
The underlying file system in ReadyNAS OS 6 is btrfs, which is a copy on write file system. You mean butterface:)!!! Any chance for some white paper on Veem and readynas I could get my hands on? Spending serious cash on something that might work, it is not my idea of picking up a DR solution. On paper, yah all seems possible but hardly every works in practice. Are you currently maintaining such marriage? Would Netgear support it?
Thanks again kohdee. Your help is most appreciated.
Veeam can use the same iSCSI LUN if it is backing up your file server and your VMs.
When you're doing this over iSCSI, the ReadyNAS is processing disk commands over the network and storing them in a single preallocated file.
Is your concern that the ReadyNAS won't process the disk commands fast enough at certain times? There is also a RN4220 option has 10 gig options and 8 gb of RAM could be ruled in if you have 10 gig in your network.
File system configuration on the LUN to match the RAID probably helps out a lot. The RAID uses 64 K chunk sizes. RAID 10 will give you a lot of extra operations but lots of disks. The biggest complaints customers normally have is due to improper configuration for the use case. The recommendations I provided for configuration would best help keep the unit performing for continued success.
I have been trying to find more time to head to my lab and set this up to get decent numbers over longer periods of time so I can get some numbers like that out, but I find my time being spent on other crisis. 😛 I've been running Veeam at home for my VMs but I do a lot of testing and manipualtion anyway with my devices so my numbers are not realistic to actually trade.
NETGEAR Support can't support Veeam itself as Support can only support NETGEAR products (not third party applications), but the business device experts can help address problems you may be having. They support the fact that you're using something to backup to the device and now your device is not behaving properly, for instance. They might be able to answer or make recommendations like some of the same that I've provided here.
