Backup Exec 2014 Disk Storage options

[cwlindy]

I have a Dell R610 1U server.  It has ESXi 5.5 on it.  Attached to that server via SAS cable is a Dell PowerVault device, 27TB

Right now I have a single Windows 2012 R2 VM on the ESXi host, that I plan on installing Backup Exec on to.  The attached storage is seen by the ESXi host as a single 27TB VMFS 5.0 volume.

My question is can I use a VMDK file attached to the Windows VM running Backup Exec as backup storage?  I would probably give it 10-20 TB vmdk, format it as GPT in the Windows VM, and use it as a de-duplication disk, if its supported.

Thanks for any input!

[pkh · Accepted solution]

Yes. You can do what you proposed.  It is supported, but not recommended because dedup uses a lot of resources and the VM might not be able to deliver.  Also, you would have a problem with recovery.  If the VM host crashed.  How are you going to recover the media server and then your other VM's.

[cwlindy]

The VM running Backup Exec is on that attached Powervault, 40gig C:\ Drive vmdk, 40gig D:\ Drive vmdk, Backup Exec will be on the D:\ drive when I install it.  So right now I am only using up 80-100gig for that VM out of the 27TB.  I would give it a E:\ drive of 10 or 20 TB, for the dedupe storage.

If the host died, I would just install ESXi onto a new host, attach the storage, and add the BE VM to inventory, via the VMware client.  The storage is RAID 6 with a hot spare, dual power and such.  VMware is installed on mirrored drives in the host.

The host has dual 6 cores, hyper threaded so VMware thinks there are 24 cores, and it has 96gigs of RAM.  I was planning on giving the VM 4 CPU's and 32gigs of RAM to start off with.  I could add more CPU's/RAM later if it needed it.

We do the same thing today, on the same type hardware for Microsoft DPM today. (we are retiring it for BE)  I just wanted to make sure it was OK to do with Backup Exec.  We are only going to backup about 15 VM's to this BE instance, and replicate it to our DR site on another BE instance, with the same hareware setup.  We only keep backups for 7 days, maybe longer if dedupe is really good.

Thanks for answering both of my questions!

[pkh]

For BE, the recommendation is to use a physical server.