Upgrading our Veeam backup server
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In 2011, we bought an HP Proliant DL180 with 6 x 1TB SATA drives running Windows Server 2008R2 and Veeam B&R. This server is used exclusively to run Veeam (and store the backups Veeam creates). It's been fine, but I now need more storage as our backup sizes have grown in the last 5 years. There are no free HDD slots (there are also 2 x 250GB drives in the remaining slots which run the O/S). What should I do?
New HP 2TB drives are about $280 each. Hypertec equivalents are cheaper, but not by much. I don't have a maintenance agreement on the server and it wouldn't be cost effective to take one out. I'd rather the use the server until it dies, but I'm slightly reluctant to invest too much in new drives.
Can I get normal hard drives and install them in the existing caddies containing the existing hard drives?
I could use RAID5 instead of RAID10 to get a bit more storage out of the existing drives. I could replace the two 250GB drives with two 1TB drives, which would increase my storage, but not my much. This is likely to only be a short term solution.
I'm not committed to keeping the server, so open to any suggestions.
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@Carnival-Boy said:
In 2011, we bought an HP Proliant DL180 with 6 x 1TB SATA drives running Windows Server 2008R2 and Veeam B&R. This server is used exclusively to run Veeam (and store the backups Veeam creates). It's been fine, but I now need more storage as our backup sizes have grown in the last 5 years. There are no free HDD slots (there are also 2 x 250GB drives in the remaining slots which run the O/S). What should I do?
New HP 2TB drives are about $280 each. Hypertec equivalents are cheaper, but not by much. I don't have a maintenance agreement on the server and it wouldn't be cost effective to take one out. I'd rather the use the server until it dies, but I'm slightly reluctant to invest too much in new drives.
Can I get normal hard drives and install them in the existing caddies containing the existing hard drives?
I could use RAID5 instead of RAID10 to get a bit more storage out of the existing drives. I could replace the two 250GB drives with two 1TB drives, which would increase my storage, but not my much. This is likely to only be a short term solution.
I'm not committed to keeping the server, so open to any suggestions.
$280 for 2TB? What a rip-off. That's 3-4 times the market price. I would just get bunch of 4TB or 6TB drives from Amazon or Newegg and be done with it.
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What is the current RAID configuration in the server?
I frankly don't know if off the shelf HDDs will work or not. Though I would guess they would, but your HP RAID controller will likely complain about them at the least, and refuse to use them at the worst.
Replacing the drives is going to be the hard part in this situation. Do you need to keep all of the current data? If yes, I suggest buying a pair of 6 TB Drives, putting in them into a desktop PC, creating a software RAID 1 over them, then image the DL180 to those drives.
Then you can rip out all of the drives from the DL180, replace them all with the same size/type drive, create a OBR10, install Hyper-V or XenServer, then create a VM then restore your backup images on the PC RAID 1 to this new VM.
If you go with eight 2 TB drives, that will give you 8 TB of usable space, the OS will take a little of that, but who cares about 60 GB when you're talking about 8 TB. Of course you could double that with 4 TB drives, etc.
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@Carnival-Boy said:
Can I get normal hard drives and install them in the existing caddies containing the existing hard drives?
Generally you need new caddies. IF you can get the caddies off of the existing drives, then yes, you can put in "normal" drives.
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@marcinozga said:
$280 for 2TB? What a rip-off. That's 3-4 times the market price.
No, that's the actual market price. You are thinking of unsupported consumer drives. There are not in any way comparable. The consumer drives don't come with the things that drive up the price on warrantied, on site replacement enterprise drives with customer firmware and caddies.
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@Dashrender said:
What is the current RAID configuration in the server?
Two 250GB drives, RAID10, 1 logical drive, holds Windows O/S plus Veeam program files and database.
Six 1TB drives, RAID10, 1 logical drive, holds Veeam backup repository
P410 RAID controller.So replacing the drives is pretty easy (I think!). Copy the repository files to external USB drive (about 2TB data). Delete the array, remove the drives, install new drives, create new array, boot into Windows, rescan disks, format disk, copy files from external USB drive, job done. A little time consuming, but otherwise I think this is how it would be done (correct me if I'm wrong!).
Windows is running on bare metal. I don't have a particular problem with virtualising Veeam but I don't see the point? It will cause a slight performance hit without any strong advantages.
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@Carnival-Boy said:
Windows is running on bare metal. I don't have a particular problem with virtualising Veeam but I don't see the point? It will cause a slight performance hit without any strong advantages.
A specific time that it makes things handy is when you need to copy the data off to change the stoage
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@Carnival-Boy said:
@Dashrender said:
What is the current RAID configuration in the server?
Two 250GB drives, RAID10, 1 logical drive, holds Windows O/S plus Veeam program files and database.
Six 1TB drives, RAID10, 1 logical drive, holds Veeam backup repository
P410 RAID controller.So replacing the drives is pretty easy (I think!). Copy the repository files to external USB drive (about 2TB data). Delete the array, remove the drives, install new drives, create new array, boot into Windows, rescan disks, format disk, copy files from external USB drive, job done. A little time consuming, but otherwise I think this is how it would be done (correct me if I'm wrong!).
Yep, this is definitely on option.
Windows is running on bare metal. I don't have a particular problem with virtualising Veeam but I don't see the point? It will cause a slight performance hit without any strong advantages.
The advantage is removing hardware dependence. Though your dependence might not be that high to begin with.
The performance hit wouldn't even be noticeable to something like a backup server, probably well below 1%.
Another advantage would be the ability to use the two slots that the OS is on as part of your backup storage. You're spending two drive slots on space that could extend your data nodes noticeably.
Then there's drive performance. You'll get the IOPs of those two drive bays added to the whole array. The windows stuff is used so little that any use by it will be significantly outweighed by the potential bonuses you'll give the whole array to the actual in use stuff - the backup storage.
Now, in a backup situation, that last bit probably doesn't really mean much. Unless the disks are the bottleneck and not the network.
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@Dashrender said:
Another advantage would be the ability to use the two slots that the OS is on as part of your backup storage. You're spending two drive slots on space that could extend your data nodes noticeably.
He could do that physically, too.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@Dashrender said:
Another advantage would be the ability to use the two slots that the OS is on as part of your backup storage. You're spending two drive slots on space that could extend your data nodes noticeably.
He could do that physically, too.
what?
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I was wondering about leaving the server as is, and purchasing something like a ReadyNAS to use as the Veeam repository. For the price of 6 2TB HP drives I could buy a ReadyNAS with 4 x 4TB drives and get 5 years warranty. Then, if the HP server was to die, I could just replace it with a new diskless server for peanuts and keep the ReadyNAS storage as is. But I don't know if this is likely to result in an unacceptable performance hit.
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@Dashrender said:
@scottalanmiller said:
@Dashrender said:
Another advantage would be the ability to use the two slots that the OS is on as part of your backup storage. You're spending two drive slots on space that could extend your data nodes noticeably.
He could do that physically, too.
what?
Put all of his drives into a single array (replacing the two littles with matching bigger ones) and install the OS and the data partitions to the same array to get a lot more space (and performance) with minimal investment.
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@Carnival-Boy said:
I was wondering about leaving the server as is, and purchasing something like a ReadyNAS to use as the Veeam repository. For the price of 6 2TB HP drives I could buy a ReadyNAS with 4 x 4TB drives and get 5 years warranty. Then, if the HP server was to die, I could just replace it with a new diskless server for peanuts and keep the ReadyNAS storage as is. But I don't know if this is likely to result in an unacceptable performance hit.
The biggest chance will be the addition of the network bottleneck... but you already have that on the front end with the system talking to the HP, so I doubt that it will be very bad.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@Dashrender said:
@scottalanmiller said:
@Dashrender said:
Another advantage would be the ability to use the two slots that the OS is on as part of your backup storage. You're spending two drive slots on space that could extend your data nodes noticeably.
He could do that physically, too.
what?
Put all of his drives into a single array (replacing the two littles with matching bigger ones) and install the OS and the data partitions to the same array to get a lot more space (and performance) with minimal investment.
I thought I said that? that's why I was confused by your comment.
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@Dashrender said:
@scottalanmiller said:
@Dashrender said:
@scottalanmiller said:
@Dashrender said:
Another advantage would be the ability to use the two slots that the OS is on as part of your backup storage. You're spending two drive slots on space that could extend your data nodes noticeably.
He could do that physically, too.
what?
Put all of his drives into a single array (replacing the two littles with matching bigger ones) and install the OS and the data partitions to the same array to get a lot more space (and performance) with minimal investment.
I thought I said that? that's why I was confused by your comment.
I thought that you associated that with a benefit of virtualization.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@Carnival-Boy said:
I was wondering about leaving the server as is, and purchasing something like a ReadyNAS to use as the Veeam repository. For the price of 6 2TB HP drives I could buy a ReadyNAS with 4 x 4TB drives and get 5 years warranty. Then, if the HP server was to die, I could just replace it with a new diskless server for peanuts and keep the ReadyNAS storage as is. But I don't know if this is likely to result in an unacceptable performance hit.
The biggest chance will be the addition of the network bottleneck... but you already have that on the front end with the system talking to the HP, so I doubt that it will be very bad.
The network bottle neck is a real concern, assuming your drives aren't a bigger one.
Also, what RAID is the ReadyNAS? RAID 10 or 5? Assuming RAID 10, and 8 TB is enough, you'll probably be fine, but remember you are reducing your IOPs, but for backup and restore, you probably don't care.
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@scottalanmiller said:
@Dashrender said:
@scottalanmiller said:
@Dashrender said:
@scottalanmiller said:
@Dashrender said:
Another advantage would be the ability to use the two slots that the OS is on as part of your backup storage. You're spending two drive slots on space that could extend your data nodes noticeably.
He could do that physically, too.
what?
Put all of his drives into a single array (replacing the two littles with matching bigger ones) and install the OS and the data partitions to the same array to get a lot more space (and performance) with minimal investment.
I thought I said that? that's why I was confused by your comment.
I thought that you associated that with a benefit of virtualization.
Aww, I see, I didn't spell it out as it's own benefit regardless of virtualization.. gotcha..
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@scottalanmiller said:
The biggest chance will be the addition of the network bottleneck... but you already have that on the front end with the system talking to the HP, so I doubt that it will be very bad.
We also offload the backup files to an external hard drive, weekly. The 1GB network connection in the server is going to be much slower than the USB 3.0 connection, I believe.
With a ReadyNAS, I'd be tempted to connect it directly to the server, but a quick Google brings up a quote from @scottalanmiller on Spiceworks saying NAS should never be a solution for a one to one connection and DAS is always preferable. Is that still the case?
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@Dashrender said:
Also, what RAID is the ReadyNAS? RAID 10 or 5? Assuming RAID 10, and 8 TB is enough, you'll probably be fine, but remember you are reducing your IOPs, but for backup and restore, you probably don't care.
RAID10 I believe. Why wouldn't I care about IOPS? The HP 410 RAID controller may also be faster than whatever is used by the ReadyNAS. Speed is always important with backup and recovery - especially recovery.
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@Carnival-Boy said:
@Dashrender said:
Also, what RAID is the ReadyNAS? RAID 10 or 5? Assuming RAID 10, and 8 TB is enough, you'll probably be fine, but remember you are reducing your IOPs, but for backup and restore, you probably don't care.
RAID10 I believe. Why wouldn't I care about IOPS? The HP 410 RAID controller may also be faster than whatever is used by the ReadyNAS. Speed is always important with backup and recovery - especially recovery.
You would care, but only up until it has enough IOPS then you wouldn't care further. Backups have a maximum potential write throughput, once you can accept it at full speed, you don't care that you could take more because there is no more to take (currently.)
