Last year I blogged about the creation of Veeam v7 best practice guides for Nutanix plus VMware and Hyper-V. Those guides have been very popular, and helped a number of our customers and SEs. One of the number one compliments of Veeam that I hear from the field is now simple it is to install and configure, just like Nutanix. No professional services are needed, or days long installs. Click through the install wizard, and you are practically ready to do backups. Competing products can be vastly much more complicated to install and configure.
I’m proud to announce that both guides (VMware and Hyper-V)Â have been refreshed for some of the new features in Veeam v8. Veeam v8 was a major release, with hundreds of new features and enhancements. Luca Dell’Oca from Veeam spearheaded the updates, which are now available for immediate download.
Veeam and Nutanix Best Practice Guide for VMware
Veeam and Nutanix Best Practices Guide for Hyper-V
So if you are a Nutanix customer and either currently use Veeam, or are looking at Veeam, please downloads the guides and review the contents. I’d also like to take a minute to address one point of discussion brought up in the guides. The VMware guide recommends the use of ‘network mode’ backups versus hot-add. There’s a common misperception that network mode is somehow dog slow, and only hot-add should be used. When using 10G NICs, backup speeds with network mode should not be a problem. In fact, hot-add mode can take 2-3 minutes per VM just to perform the hot-add operation and multiply that by hundreds of VMs and that’s hours of waiting. For quick incremental backups, that can dramatically slow down the job progress.
Thus after in house testing and collaboration with Veeam, we are recommending network mode backups. If you are having backup performance issues even after following the guides, I encourage you to open a support ticket with either Nutanix or Veeam, and our support professionals can get to the bottom of your particular issue. Backups are complicated and everyone’s infrastructure is different, so minor tweaks may be needed to optimize backup throughput. Also, keep up to date with the latest Veeam updates, as newer updates are faster and more stable. The same applies to keeping up with Nutanix NOS updates, as we’ve seen significant performance increases with many of our releases. The beauty of software defined storage!
