General guidelines

Please always check the general deduplication appliances section as the best practices listed there also apply to ExaGrid.

Integrated vs Non-integrated

Always use ExaGrid as Integrated with Veeam, as it provides many performance benefits over the non-integrated type. These include, but are not limited to:

• Run the Veeam data mover directly on the ExaGrid appliances meaning there is no requirement for an extra gateway server.
• Immutability support by leveraging Retention Time-Lock.
• Much faster Synthetic Full Backups.
• Improved performance for Instant Recovery, SureBackup, On-Demand Sandbox, File- and Item-level recovery.

More details on these supported features are available on our Veeam Help Center.

A (Windows-based) Mount Server is still required for restore operations.

ExaGrid uses the concept of a “landing zone”. This zone holds the most recent set of backup data and must have sufficient capacity to keep at least one uncompressed full backup and one incremental backup. This ensures that File- and Item Level Recovery, but also Backup Copy, SureBackup and Instant VM Recovery, works fine without performance impact as there is no rehydration.

Architecture Guidelines

For architecture guidelines for ExaGrid, please refer to the Architecture Guidelines for Backup Storage.

Encryption

It’s recommended to disable data encryption on Veeam side, as it has a negative effect on the deduplication ratio.

In case data encryption is required, the best practice is to use ExaGrid systems with Self-Encrypting Drives. This decision must be made in advance, as changing from un-encrypted to encrypted is only possible through hardware replacement.

Maintenance

In case of extent maintenance the landing zone will be brought offline by the Scale-Out Backup Repository manager. All the backup chains kept in the landing zone will be unavailable while the deduplicated part of the data held by an appliance where the offline extent resides will still be available to the other members of the grid. All chains but the ones hosted on the offline member will be available for Veeam operations.

If an evacuate operation is triggered on the Veeam Backup & Replication side to remove an appliance from the grid, only the landing zone will be evacuated by the Veeam transport agent. The deduplicated data should thereafter be evacuated through a specific process handled by the Exagrid support.

If the grid member becomes offline before being evacuated by Exagrid support, some unique deduplicated blocks might be lost potentially corrupting all the backup chains of the grid.

References

• Veeam Alliance Partner Integrations & Qualifications - Exagrid -> Deduplication Target
• KB1745 - Deduplication Appliance Best Practices
• Veeam Help Center - Exagrid
• ExaGrid Best Practices

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