cancel
Showing results for 
Search instead for 
Did you mean: 

Dedicated network interface for Backups of our VMs on vSphere 6 VSAN Cluster

syag_tk
Level 0

Hey guys,
we are currently setting up our new and dedicated BE 2016 server to back up our VMs on a vSphere 6 VSAN cluster. In order to speed backups up, we would like to utilize a dedicated 10 Gbit connection for our backups. 

Here's a brief overview of our intended setup:

Dedicated Backup Server:
We have a Windows 2012 R2 machine with 2 NICs. The first NIC is a 1-Gbit interface, used for management traffic and operating in its own (Managament)-VLAN with IP 192.168.200.41. The second interface is 10G and dedicated for Backup-traffic, also in its own (Backup)-VLAN with IP-address 192.168.180.20. On the server we have Backup Exec 2016 installed.

VMware Cluster:
Our cluster consists of 3 vSphere 6 hosts and a vsan cluster. Our servers are attached via 2 10G interfaces each and some dedicated 1G NICs. The 10G interfaces are VLAN-trunks over a "LAG" and used for VM-traffic on different VLANs and some vmkernel-traffic, like VSAN-replication. The 10G uplinks are "attached" to a dvSwitch.

The dedicated 1G NICs are used for Management of the ESXi-servers and also for vCenter, which also operates in our 192.168.200.X network segment. These uplinks are attached to "local" vSwitches.

So, our plan for backing up the virtual machines is to utilize the 10G interfaces of the backup server. However, it is not clear to us how we can achieve that with our intended network structure and Backup Exec 2016. I've read a lot of documentation and message board posts, but I still don't know how this can be done.

As our backup server and vCenter are in the same (Management)-network, BE2016 uses the 1G connection to connect to vCenter and to create snapshots, which is fine. But, we would then like BE2016 read and write the data over our 10G interface and the VLAN-trunk of our VMware servers.  

Any chance this can be done? Appreciate any help, thanks in advance!

Cheers
Sascha

1 REPLY 1

Colin_Weaver
Moderator
Moderator
Employee Accredited Certified

Backup Exec has to use the LAN that was used when adding the ESXi hosts into the VCenter - there is no way to control this and as such we cannot directly support a Backup LAN in the same way that we can with our remote agents

 

For VMware The correct way to achieve backups without using LAN is SAN Transport where you present the VMFS datastores to the BE server as well as the ESXi hosts. That said I am not sure how VSAN setups fit into  this concept.