Hi All,

I’m working on building a dedicated appliance to use for Veeam backups in my lab. Ideally Veeam will run in a VM in my normal vSAN clsuter, so this server will only run storage for Veeam. I know ZFS isnt great for block storage for VM datastores, but it should be just fine for a Veeam repository. Is there any other OS’s I should check out? Ive got a pair of 400GB Enterprise SAS SSD’s that I was planning on using in either server for either an l2 arc or slog. Would either be benificial for just dumping backups? I can get Veeam to saturate a 10g nic easily, so looking for a little performance boost.

I’m planning on using either one of these two servers and having it scheduled to turn on overnight for a few hours to avoid wasting power 24/7 on spinning rust just to grab backups for 3 hours a day or so.

Server 1:

HP DL380 G9 SFF

1x Xeon E5 2650 v4 12 Core

12x 16gb = 192GB DDR4 ECC

22x 1.2TB SAS 10k Hard Drives

2x 400GB SAS SSD

128GB M.2 (boot)

dual intel 10g x540 Nic

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Server 2:

Dell R630 10 bay

Dual Xeon E5 2620 v4 8 core (16 total)

12x 16gb = 192GB DDR4 ECC

8x 1.2TB SAS 10k Hard Drives

2x 400GB SAS SSD

128GB M.2 (boot)

dual intel 10g x540 Nic

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I dont love the HP and have it kicking around without a use, however I figured since it has 24 bays it would make a decent archive / backup server, however its a bit louder and more power hungry than the dell (and ~8tb should be sufficient for what im backing up)

Any other OS’s / backup solutions to consider? All of my servers run in Vm’s on ESXI 8.0, and I have a Nutanix AOS lab as well, so thats the requirement for compatability (nutanix is just for testing, dont *need* backups, but it would be nice)

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