1

Atmosphere is a Medical facility with vCenter and 2 Vmware host

Currently they have the datastores and the veeam backup and snapshot all on the shared storage Dell Powervault ME5024 this is setup as the SAN
Veeam BR Advanced 12.0
The snapshots setting for retention are on the ME5204 so I am not sure if Veeam is backing them up or What?

I know terrible IDEA.

We are moving all backups and snapshots to a synology nas system.

Currently they are backing up snapshots for 13 days crazy.

What is a good backup plan as well as snapshots plan you all would recommend or have done?

Thanks in advance

2 Spice ups
(adrian_ych) 2
  1. What Veeam software ? Version end edition ??
  2. What do you mean by “Backup” & “Snapshot” ??

What is the “shared Dell powervault” ? This can be a NAS or a SAN as Dell PowerVault is the Dell brand for their storage solutions ?

There is no wrong or right until maybe I understand the full picture ?

3

Per @adrian_ych more info would be helpful.

I am curious if I read the current mode of operation correctly - that VMware snapshots are being kept for 13 days and also backed up? If so, please stop this immediately. VMware snapshots are not complete in and of themselves and offer no value in terms of restoring a system. VMware snapshots are merely change logs that hold any disk writes in place of writing to a base disk or previous snapshot which is made read-only. VM snapshots are intended as a temporary rollback point during system maintenance and similar activities to allow a convenient rollback in case of problems. Please disregard if I misread.

Veeam supports backup of files as well as VMs as images that can be used to restore entire VMs or files thereon, and even instantly mounted as operable VMs to facilitate rapid recovery.

2 Spice ups
4

LOL Bro… just 2 things…

  1. It is literally impossible to backup VMware snapshots using most VMware supported backup software as the backup software would backup the VM. Normally when you recover the VM, it does not recover with snapshots as per VMware but just the VM.

  2. I did ask for which Veeam product as there are like 27 “Veeam” products out there.
    Then there was a case where lots of people chipped in…only then they found out the whole 1 week of posts were useless as the person (OP of that chat) was using Veeam Agent for Windows and not VBR ? Or in another case where was using VBR but VBR 9.x and tons of features from VBR 11.x or 12.x were not there also.

Cheers mate…weekend is here !!!

1 Spice up
5

Leave the snapshots with the VMs.
Move the backups to the NAS

You need to get them off the idea of keeping snapshots for longer than 2-3 days, they are not backups and shouldn’t be used as so, if they reverted to the snapshot taken 12 days ago, they lose all the data over those days too, so never a good idea.

This is going to be down to company policy, but snapshot should only be taken prior to major changes, perhaps a new application install or configuration, bore windows patches, but should be removed once everything is confirmed to be working.

Backups, daily but they may want twice daily, depends on their requirements, retention policy, NAS capacity

1 Spice up
6

Any backup plan that fits businesses’ RTPO and complies with 3-2-1 backup rules is good.

As for the snapshot plan, it is quite simple. Use VM snapshots only for short-term temporary needs https://www.starwindsoftware.com/blog/vmwaresnapshots-checkpoints-alone-arent-backups. Use storage-level snapshots if you need long-lasting restore points in addition to backups.

2 Spice ups
7

Hey OP! For a potential backup and snapshot plan, it’s recommended to follow the 3-2-1 rule (3 copies, 2 media types, 1 offsite) as mentioned above.

However! Due to the increase in cybercrimes, some are also suggesting an expansion on that original rule with the 3-2-1-1-0 backup rule to help secure data (3-2-1 + one extra copy + zero errors upon backups).

So, the 3-2-1-1-0 backup rule with immutable backups could help offer up a more well-rounded approach to data security.

Hope that helps!

1 Spice up
8

Dell Powervault ME5024 this is setup as the SAN
Veeam BR Advanced 12.0
The snapshots setting for retention are on the ME5204 so I am not sure if Veeam is backing them up or What?

Thanks again everyone Adiran, Jeffjones, Rodit and Kelly

1 Spice up
9

In this case, these are storage snapshots, and most probably, Veeam has no idea about them, which is fine.

How do you plan to use your Synology?

  • Noob: Configure an SMB/CIFS share and put backups there.
  • Novice: Connect Synology over iSCSI as pure block storage directly to the Veeam B&R machine, format it as ReFS, and use it as a backup repository with reverse incremental and block cloning.
  • Advanced: Connect Synology over iSCSI as pure block storage to a dedicated Linux VM, format as XFS, and use it as a Linux backup repository with the same features as above.
  • Expert: Connect Synology over iSCSI as pure block storage to a dedicated Linux VM and setup a Veeam Hardened Repository. Add startup and finish scripts to your backup jobs that power up/shut down the VHR virtual machine for air gapping.

You can use our pre-built Veeam VHR appliance https://www.starwindsoftware.com/blog/starwind-san-nas-as-hardened-repository-for-veeam-br, its free :wink:

2 Spice ups
10

can you confirm where did you see the snapshots ??

11

I saw the configuration of the schedule to do them on the ME5024?

12

I think you might to confirm if what you saw are retention periods and not VM snapshots ??

If you see in VBR storage or VBR config, those are retentions
If you see in the VMs via vCenter under snapshots, those are snapshots.

Very very big difference …
In the past VBR (7.x to 9.x) used VM snapshots literally…in vCenter, you can see many many snapshots in the VM.

  • only VBR can delete older snapshots, we “humans” can only delete newer snapshots or all snapshots
  • if you manually created snapshots (eg before windows update), the whole backup will screw up as VBR would take reference from the newer snapshots
  • so now with VBR 11.x or 12.x, the “snapshots” are saved as backup data sets in the backup repositories as part of the retention period.

Then what type of backup are you running ? Daily full, increment or the reverse increment ?

I would highly using the Veeam reverse increment then have a backup copy to the NAS for 2nd storage (if you have space on SAN).
Normally, we would create a VM-VBR with 120GB for OS and large storage for backup data sets. Then use Veeam reverse increment so that the last backup would be a synthetic full backup with small increments (number depends on retention period).

  • Next create a Veeam Backup copy job so that each increment is sent to the 2nd Backup repository (after the 1st initial full backup)
  • You can also create GFS (like 3 weekly 3 monthly 2 qtr and 7 annually) to have the full backups kept for extended periods
  • Advantages :
  1. the backup is very fast and VMs are not hindered for extended periods of time (increment backup jobs can take 2-15 minutes) and synthetic full uses the VM-VBR resources rather than “locking down” the actual VM.
  2. Transfer of Veeam Backup copy is also very fast as small increments are transferred, then VM-VBR merges the synthetic full
  3. The creation of synthetic full also acts like an additional verification process.
1 Spice up
13

I have verified the snapshots that are taking up space on the ME5024 San are setup and controlled on the ME5024 some are set to 13 days the reset set to 7 days I adjust them to 3 and 2 days since they are also taking up space.

My question is for snapshots what is the best way to configure these ?

Create snapshots from VM I assume in vCenter put on datastore or nas?
Create backups from veeam to go on nas, leave snapshots on san decvice with datastores?
Create snapshots from veeam and store on new nas and let Veeam do backups and snapshots?

Other then taking a snapshot before you do work on a vm why do we need them on a regular basis?

You recommend doing Veeam Reverse increment as one best way of doing this then explaining what you have done perfect! thanks for this