VEEAM Hardened Repository ISO thoughts?

Hi,

That is imo a pretty simple thing to declare.

The ISO provided by Veeam removes many additional layers of management overhead. Veeam will take care of OS and security updates so you don’t have to deal with that anymore. Additionally the rollout (installation) is pretty straight-forward so it saves a lot of time.

Yes, you could manually install a supported Linux OS and manually perform the hardening but you’ll have to maintain that and make sure that everything’s running smoothly - Veeam would surely handle that for you. :)

Another positive fact is that it simplifies the support process to use that Veeam ISO. Veeam knows exactly what they’re doing so the support will me a lot quicker and easier to handle (for both sides).

A re-installation would also take only a short amount of time and you even don’t lose your backup data stored on that VHR.

Additional thoughts (wouldn’t call this “negative aspects”):

You can only run the ISO on supported hardware with local storage. In case you have a very large server with multiple data volumes (e.g. multiple RAIDs or an external storage) you can’t use the ISO right now.

For some “refreshed” hardware that is already in-place and has already been in use (many smaller customer “recycle” their hardware for this) you might not have support since this hardware might now be on the compatibility list.

In case you or your company has strict policies for specific Linux distributions you might have to think about the ISO as well - this is Rocky Linux. In case you have to use another Linux you’ll have to run this without the ISO.

In short: I’d strongly recommend using the Veeam ISO in case that your hardware is supported, there’s nothing against it (imo).

Hope that helps.

Lukas

You can do either the 2.0 ISO or a self made server as you noted.  The ISO makes it easier to set up over doing yourself.

Also the v13 cannot work with v12.  You would need to move to v13.

Nothing really more to add than with the ISO, everything is handled for you → OS install as well as hardening, whereas with self-config and running the script is a little bit more manual.

Also, from my recollection..as a negative (& maybe Chris and Lukas can confirm), with the ISO, if you plan on running your repo from a SAN (i.e. iSCSI or FC) connected to your hardware, you won’t be able to configure your storage as such if you use the ISO. For that kind of config, you are then relegated to only having the option to self-install the OS & then run the script to harden.

Hope that helps.

Best.

Yeah the ISO has problems with both iSCSI and FC storage so not the way to go if that is your environment.  Self install is the better option here for this.

Thanks guys, 

The new repo would be Lenovo SR ThinkSystem
SR630 V4 with local storage for one repo. For the other repo same system but with additional D1212 shelves via SAS.

I don’t think there is a reason to have multiple RAID.

Yep ​@gravelrider ...then you’ll be fine. I have a DELL PowerEdge R740 with 2 SAS for Ubuntu 24.04 OS on XFS, and the remaining 8 disks used for Repo storage (84TB if memory serves) configured in a RAID 60. You should configure RAID for redundancy in case of disk failure you can recover for each Repo.

Best.

Decision made then :-)

Thanks team

Sure..glad to help 😊

This will definitely work with the ISO then.  Glad to have helped.