How to choose the best backup strategy for mixed environments (VM + Physical + Cloud)?

I won’t comment on how to structure them (it’s probably specific to your environment) but I will say that you can’t mixed backups of different types in the same job.

Physical (probably) requires a Veeam Agent backup, where virtual requires a VMWare/Hypervisor backup. The two are completely different and require there own jobs.

Rob

Implementation and structure will depend on your environment and SLAs/RPO/RTO for implementing Veeam.  You can combine workloads but I would keep them separate for each type.  Use the Agent for physical machines and set up a Protection Group or Groups in Veeam.  Virtual will be the other ones.

Ensure resources and enough proxies for backups.  Check the best practice site too - https://bp.veeam.com/vbr/

Also use the calculator site too for help - https://www.veeam.com/calculators

Your question of if you should divide workloads by type is answered for you, seeing as it is not possible to combine multiple types of workload in a single job.

You’ll need multiple jobs, a VM Backup Job (Whichever hypervisor you use), an agent job (via a protection group that has each of the physical servers you want to back up added to it), and whatever cloud based workload you have, managed by it’s respective plugin (on the Veeam server side) and appliance (On the cloud side).

Other grouping factors may involve desired retention, schedule, etc.

Regarding storage usage, there are many different options, but I would recommend you use an option that enables the use of synthetic fulls.

There are a lot of great learning materials available that will help point you in the right direction, I would check out Veeam University Free as it may answer many of your questions.