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Accelerating Veeam backups

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VirtuCache has a policy called ‘Backup-VM’ policy that reduces the time Veeam takes to do VM backups.

To take advantage of VirtuCache’s ‘Backup-VM’ policy you have to configure the ‘Transport Mode’ in Veeam as ‘Virtual Appliance Transport Mode’ and use VMware snapshots (not SAN controller snapshots). After this, you would assign all Veeam management and proxy VMs, the ‘Backup-VM’ policy.

Listed below is the Veeam process to backup VMs and how VirtuCache improves the performance of each step.

– When Veeam initiates the backup of a VM, it instructs VMware to create a snapshot. It then attaches the snapshot VMDK to its own Proxy VM (this process is also called snapshot ‘Hot-Add’). With the ‘Backup-VM’ policy, both these steps happen in the VirtuCache cache media, so the snapshot creation is fast.

–  Thereafter Veeam sends this VMDK to the backup target storage device.  The ‘Backup-VM’ policy ensures that this backup data is not cached, so as to not evict VM production ‘hot-data’ from the cache.

– Once the production VM is backed up by Veeam, Veeam instructs VMware to delete the snapshot from the Proxy VM and the original VM. This deletion happens in VirtuCache cache media and hence this process is speeded up as well.

In this way, the ‘Backup-VM’ policy improves the performance of Veeam backups.

– In addition, the ‘Backup-VM’ policy supports Veeam Proxy VMs that are larger than 32 TBs. When multiple snapshot VMDKs of VMs to be backed up are hot added to a Veeam Backup Proxy, as is standard in Veeam when it backs up many VMs simultaneously, the size of the Veeam proxy VM can grow very large.

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