Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365 Calculator
(Download: VBO-Calculator-Community-1Download)
Welcome back after a longer break due to holidays, personal changes and some challenges over the last weeks.
As one of the main responsible german Systems Engineer for Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365 (VBO) I received a lot of questions and requests regarding the right sizing for a VBO-environment as well as for the “new” Object Storage Repository feature, which is available since version 4.
Wouldn’t it be great if we had a tool for this ? For sure ! But let us first build up some tension.
Before we concentrate on object storage I will give you some important information for your general VBO-Sizing.
The Sizing
What do you need for a proper sizing?
To get some realistic numbers, we collect the informations per service, because in the background each service has its own compression capabilities and it does make some difference later in the cost calculation.
So we do need the amount of users per service. This is also what we call an “object”. Our proxy sizing in VBO is based on the amount of objects. One proxy can handle up to 16.000 objects (approx. 4000 Users)
An object can be an users Mailbox, Archive, Sharepoint or Onedrive. If one user work with all of these services it consumes 4 objects.
Example:
- 1200 Mail-users
- 1200 Archive-users
- 1000 Onedrive-users (because 200 are not activated for onedrive)
- 800 Sharepoint-users
And for sure – while talking about size … the stored capacity of each service.
You can find your current usage in the O365-Adminportal: (https://admin.microsoft.com/Adminportal/)
On the left side go to “Reports” and click the button “Email activity”.
Then select the proper report in the top left corner:
Now select “Storage” and “180 days” to see your numbers.
Repeat the steps for each service by selecting it using the dropdown menu.
Write down those numbers!
Before we start with the calculation lets talk about the object storage integration.
In the last past month a lot of customers were changing from on-premise storage to the cloud.
Just in short why: More flexibility, easy to grow and expand, more performance and affordable prices.
To keep it simple – Working using an Object Storage makes life easier.
But using cloud also means that sometimes it’s not that easy to predict all the prices as you wish.
Especially when working with object storage – it’s like a doorbuster – it’s easy to get in and hard to come out.
That means you can drop your files into the cloud but if you want to download them again there are egress and API call costs.
These costs vary from provider to provider. There are also providers like wasabi (www.wasabi.com) with an all-inclusive-rate.
But what does it mean in terms of VBO. Whenever we start a backup job, the job/proxy gets data from Microsoft 365 and stores it back to an object storage;Processes are reading, comparing, deleting and writing bocks to the object storage. Those processes are also generating ingress/egress/API call operations (=extra costs).
These costs are not that high, but it’s always better to know them before your your credit card bill clunks through the letter box.
So my swiss colleague Stephan Herzig started creating a calculator for calculating these costs, based on numbers we received from our worldwide team (thanks @Ed Gummett). After some discussions we decided to add all sizing relevant calculations into one beautiful Excel document for internal use.
Thats how version 1 looked like :
Over the last weeks we received a lot of feedback and requests and so we are now at version 5 of our calculator.
Time to make it public !
Lets define some rules before we start to use this.
Disclaimer: THIS IS NOT A VEEAM TOOL ! This is a private, community driven and unsupported tool based on Veeam-Best-Practice-Numbers from the field and from https://bp.veeam.com/vbo .
There is no pricing guarantee! The tool is just an indicator for your expected environment size and object storage costs when using VBO with object-storage-repository!
The pricing list (more details in the instructions below) is changing from time to time. So please be aware that the prices can vary from time to time.
Any feedback will be appreciated ! ! !
How to use:
The calculator has 5 different tabs. To start with the sizing, go to the “Input Sheet”.
As already mentioned each service has its own numbers.
In my example im using a 1000 users environment. (All Services for all users)
Now you can enter your noted numbers from the steps before. If you are unsure what to insert, enter “0”.
Enter the retention for how long you want to keep your data on the object storage.
The daily change rate is what we see in the fields. 0,5% is already a more conservative rate. You can also see you change rate in the reports from day to day. Just take the daily numbers from the adminportal and make a percent calculation.
The “Annual User Growth” should be “0” if you do not plan to raise your accounts in Office 365.
For the final calculation lets choose your object storage you plan to use. (the scale from the dropdown is a little bit buggy so please zoom in before).
We are currently working on more options but you can also add your custom one with your own numbers.
Go to the Tab “Price Sheet” and use the custom 1-8 rows. You will get these numbers from your provider or f.e. from the azure or AWS price-list.
We’re almost done !
If you want to run the complete environment on a cloud service provider or in our ready to deploy Azure appliance (https://azuremarketplace.microsoft.com/en-us/marketplace/apps/veeam.office365backup), please enter your monthly VM-Costs.
You can add your veeam license price / month (https://www.veeam.com/backup-microsoft-office-365-pricing.html) if you want to see a “per user overall price”. Also add the number of years you want to calculate the solution.
Now go to the summary-tab and check out your numbers.
If you are interested in the numbers “behind the scenes” you can go to the “Calc Sheet” or “HW Calc” tab.
If you have questions about the calculator, numbers or any feedback please leave a comment below.
But for now have fun using this awesome tool !
!