Veeam Backup Enterprise Manager (VBEM)
When acting as an IaaS Service Provider for internal or external customers, VBEM becomes a cornerstone of your offering as it provides access to the:
- RESTful API for automation, billing and reporting.
- Self-service Backup Portal for VMware vSphere and VMware Cloud Director environments.
For all other workloads (including VMware), Role-based access can be used to delegate access.
In this scenario, job management is fully controlled by the service provider and the customer has only specific restore capabilities.
Server placement
It is advised to install the VBEM server at the recovery site so it is directly available in case of disaster recovery.
To provide high availability to VBEM use:
- VMware vSphere Fault Tolerance
- Microsoft Hyper-V Failover Cluster
- Veeam VM Replication
- Veeam CDP Replication
When used as a Self-Service Portal (specifically in IaaS scenario), it should be placed in a DMZ zone.
Sizing
Enterprise Manager server compute
There is no official sizing available for Veeam Enterprise Manager server. However, you can use the below as an approximate estimate. Be aware that you may need to adjust it after go-live:
| Size | Resources |
|---|---|
| Up to 500 VMs | 6 cores, 12 GB RAM |
| 500-2500 VMs | 8 cores, 16 GB RAM |
| 2500-5000 VMs | 10 cores, 20 GB RAM |
| 5000-10000 VMs | 12 cores, 24 GB RAM |
Database
As there are many variables, a rule of thumb of 10 GB per 500 VMs can be used. However keep in mind, that it’s usually to see massive temporary growth of the Enterprise Manager databases during the upgrade (sometimes up to 50%-100% of the initial size).
Manager Catalog
If you are planning extensive file restores from large file servers you can enhance the user experience through 1-Click file restores with help of the file indexing engine. Veeam Catalog Service is responsible for maintaining index data.
In a backup infrastructure, Veeam Guest Catalog Service is running on Veeam Backup server and Veeam Backup Enterprise Manager server. More details on the difference are here
The service running on Enterprise Manager server is moving(and deleting) original index data from all managed backup servers into Enterprise Manager local catalog. Therefore it should be sized appropriately to hold all data from all remote Veeam servers.
- When using a Standard license, Enterprise Manager will only keep index data for restore points still in repositories.
- For Enterprise and Enterprise Plus licenses, you can configure Enterprise Manager to keep indexes even longer, with the default being 3 months. This can significantly increase the amount of space required for the catalog.
When indexing is enabled in a backup job without Veeam Backup Catalog running in Enterprise Manager, the catalog will grow endless until the Veeam Backup server is out of disk space.
Estimated used space of the final index file after compression is approximately 2 MB per 1,000,000 files for a single VM restore point on the Enterprise Manager server. The indexes are also stored in the backup files and temporary folders on the backup server.
Below is an example that summarizes the information above. The example is given per indexed VM containing 10,000,000 files.
10 million files * 2 MB per million files * 60 restore points per month * 3 months index retention = 3.5 GB