Appliance
The backup appliance orchestrates snapshot and backup operations. This is where you configure credentials, worker settings, backup repositories, policies, and can manage restore operations. As a control plane, several of the actual tasks are performed with workers. The appliance communicates with workers to perform the required tasks such as backup, restore, archive and retention operations.
Recommendations
If you want to change the appliance size you have to do this after the appliance has been deployed.
The following recommendations and examples apply to the latest VBG builds 1.
The default size appliance e2-standard-2 (2 cores, 8 GiB RAM) can handle up to a maximum of 200 VM instances in parallel. By default the instance is limited to 15 parallel sessions. Sessions includes policies, restore, rescan and retention activities. Per policy, VBG can processes 25 VM instances in parallel.
For better performance, we recommend to use these appliance sizes 2.
| Appliance size | Advised maximum workloads |
|---|---|
| e2-standard-2 (2 cores, 8 GiB RAM) | 100 |
| e2-standard-4 (4 cores, 16 GiB RAM) | 200 |
| e2-standard-8 (8 cores, 32 GiB RAM) | 2500 |
| e2-standard-16 (16 cores, 64 GiB RAM) | 5000 |
When growing the appliance, it is recommended to add an extra 8 cores and 32 GiB RAM per each 2500 workloads.
When integrating VBG with VBR, policy and retention data is imported.
You can connect more than one VBG appliance to a single VBR server, however make sure you size your VBR infrastructure appropriately. If working on a cross-geography cloud project it makes sense to use a VBR server per macro-region, to alleviate issues relating to latency as well and help with meet potential data residency regulations.