This question comes up a lot. Veeam Backup & Replication v5 is supported for installation on a both a physical and virtual machine (VM). There are a number of factors that will steer the decision to go either with a virtual or physical installation of Veeam Backup & Replication.
Generally speaking, Veeam’s recommendation is to install Veeam Backup & Replication as a VM for small vSphere deployments but there are some scenarios where a physical server might be better. Here are a few scenarios beneficial for each installation method:
Installing Veeam Backup & Replication as a virtual machine
- Best for small numbers of VMs that the server will be backing up. It is difficult to identify a specific number, but some configurations would have 30–40—or fewer—VMs to be backed up per server.
- Best when a spike in CPU workload can be absorbed in the vSphere cluster. Typically, small vSphere deployments are under-provisioned and have plenty of spare capacity. Likewise, high consolidation ratio deployments which are not, however, running at peak load 24/7, can easily absorb the load from running Veeam Backup & Replication as a VM during off-hours.
- The best backup performance is with NFS storage used in production, common in smaller vSphere deployments.
Installing Veeam Backup & Replication as a physical server
- Allows for super-fast, 100% LAN-free backups using direct SAN access with fibre channel and iSCSI storage. With a capable Veeam Backup & Replication server, throughput rates can be incredible.
- Will completely offload the spike in the CPU workload from the vSphere (or VI3) environment to the physical server. It can often be less expensive to use Veeam Backup & Replication as a physical server due to cheaper server hardware and no extra vSphere licensing costs for the one or more additional ESX(i) hosts required to absorb the newly introduced workload.
- Allows recovery and vPower functionality to be utilized if the production vSphere storage is not available and no virtual machines can run.
These, of course, are not the only factors to consider when deciding whether to install Veeam Backup & Replication on a physical server or a VM. Also consider the desired RPO, size of source VMs to be backed up, average amount of data changes per job iteration, backup storage to be used, storage connectivity (both source and target) and, lastly, the number of jobs that are planned run in parallel on a Veeam Backup & Replication server. Simply put, the virtual machine option may not be able to handle too many of these requirements to the intended schedule.
In the Veeam Forums, a number of discussions have brought this topic up with specific configuration scenarios and includes advice from our product team. Here is one example where a specific situation calls for installation on a physical server.
All of this information is a good starting point to scale Veeam Backup & Replication. Veeam Backup & Replication permits additional servers to be added without additional Veeam licensing costs, should additional Veeam servers suit the specific requirements best. Be sure to check out the recent webinar on protecting multiple VMs where some of the different features of Veeam Backup & Replication are identified for scaling the solution.