HPE Nimble Storage SFA. Whats that about then? Part 4 – Creating a Veeam backup job and what to look out for.

Nimble SFA – Creating a Veeam backup job and what to look out for.

Following on from part 3 – Volume Creation and Presentation to Veeam , of this blog series, we will take a look at how to create a new Veeam backup job. There are a few considerations to make during the setup which I will cover here.

Job creation

if you have ever used Veeam before, then the steps below will be more than familiar. The only thing to take note of are the storage settings on the job.

Start the new backup job wizard.

NimbleSFA35

Add the VM’s

NimbleSFA36

Select the new backup repository, set retention requirements and click advanced.

NimbleSFA37

Now this is the bit you need to pay attention to. Note the setitngs that are highlighted should be set as below.

NimbleSFA38

The following is taken from the Nimble and Veeam integration guide:

  • Compression level, select None. Veeam Backup & Replication deduplicates on a per-job basis
    only, but the SFA can achieve better deduplication and compression rates because its deduplication and
    compression are per pool.

    • Note If the Veeam backup server and the proxy server are two separate machines (virtual or physical),
      compression can be set to Optimal to minimize network traffic during the backup.  In any case, it is vitally
      important to select the Decompress backup data blocks before storing option for the backup repository
      that will be storing this backup.
  • Storage optimization list, select Local Target (16TB+ backup files). This setting, which creates a block size of 4096 KB, produced the best results in deduplication testing.
    • Note For this setting, Nimble Storage recommends a maximum job size of 64 TB for source data.

Something I couldn’t see in the guide but is shown against the screenshot is to disable Veeams inline dedupe. This is to allow the Nimble SFA to take care of it. The option for encrypting backups is also disabled. Encrypted backup sets will not deduplicate. Nimble suggests that if encryption is required, to enable it at the volume level on the array its self. Now this has its own draw backs as the encryption on the SFA is only safe guarding the physical device. If the device is rebooted, a password needs to be entered to bring the encrypted volume online. This maybe sufficient though as you still have the option to encrypt backup copy jobs that will likely be moving offsite to another storage platform.

Next, enable application aware image processing if application consistent backups are required.

NimbleSFA40

Specify the job schedule.

NimbleSFA40

Verify the job settings and click finish.

NimbleSFA41

Run the job to test.

NimbleSFA42

And that is it.

Check out PART 5 for a closer look at deduplication with the Nimble SFA.

Ian

You may also like...

1 Response

  1. 25th August 2017

    […] PART 4 – Creating a Veeam backup job and what to look out for. […]

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.