Description

Backup Exec Hardware & Solution Deployment Guide for M365 protection 

This document should be consulted when determining the deployment considerations for M365 tenants with 500 or more users.

Unlike protecting on-premises workloads, Protecting Microsoft 365 workloads requires planning for hardware (Storage and Compute) and adhering to best practices to achieve optimal performance.

Protection of the following Microsoft 365 workloads is supported from BE 22 onwards:

• Exchange Online (BE 22)
• OneDrive (BE 22)
• SharePoint Online (BE 22.1)
• Teams (BE 22.1)

We recommend using the latest Backup Exec versions for better performance, security, and stability. 

The table below highlights the granular entities that Backup Exec can protect

The above table will be updated as we move to add more entries for protection. Please keep watching this space. 

Each entity represents 1 selection count in a backup solution (job) configured.

BE Server Configuration

To protect M365 tenant (More than 500 users) in Backup Exec with optimum performance, it is suggested to deploy a BE server with,

CPU: 16 or more cores

RAM: 64 GB or higher

If you have a tenant with less than 500 users (less than 100 million items across workloads), it is suggested to deploy a BE server with,

CPU: 8 or more cores

RAM: 32 GB or higher

Backup Exec deployment considerations

• You may need to deploy multiple Backup Exec servers.
  • The number of servers required will be determined based on the entities in the M365 tenant and the number of items across the tenant.
• There will be an additional storage provision required to keep the Indexed Catalog of M365 items backed-up.
  • It is recommended to procure faster storage, like Flash/SSD, for catalogs.
• You must determine the storage space required based on your tenant’s data growth projections.
• You will need to run the Data Sizing utility to get granular information and items counted on the tenant.
• To achieve optimum backup performance, it is recommended to carefully select backup selections to distribute different sized M365 entities across backup-definitions.

We recommend using the following tool to get the number of items and total size of M365 workloads in your environment.

Microsoft 365 Data Sizing utility:

Make use of the utility provided by Arctera in the link below to gain insights into the number of items across Microsoft 365 workloads.

https://www.veritas.com/support/en_US/article.100060757

The minimum number of BE servers needed is based on the number of users in the tenant

BE server count scales with tenant users. Here is the metering we propose:

How the backup definitions should be configured

Things to consider before configuring backup definitions

• It is recommended to create separate backup definitions for each workload.
  • More jobs for a single workload can be created to gain optimum performance.
• A single BE server (16 core with 64GB RAM) can process 150 million items across all backup definitions as its upper limit.
• Optimal performance is noted when a BE server is configured with 4 backup definitions protecting M365 tenant.
• We recommend that you create a backup definition with approx. 500 selections containing maximum 35 million items across all selections.

Example #1

• Tenant has 2000 M365 users
• Customer wants to protect only Exchange Online data (Single Workload protection)
• The number of items across all user mailboxes is ~100 million

For the above configuration, 1 BE server would be sufficient, and the Server configuration  would be,

Example #2

• Tenant has 1000 M365 users
• Customer wants to protect all M365 workloads (3500 entities in total)
  • 1000 User Mailboxes
  • 300 Shared Mailboxes
  • 1000 OneDrive
  • 300 Groups
    • 300 Group Mailboxes
    • 300 Group Sites
    • 300 Group Files
  • 200 SharePoint Sites
  • 100 Teams with 5 channels per team
• Number of items across all workloads is ~400 million

For above configuration 2 BE server would be sufficient

Fine tuning the backups for Microsoft 365 workloads

• Job Speed:
  • Single BE server can back up 250 to 600 GB of data per day (24 Hours) in a Single job with standard internet connectivity. Large number of small files may impact backup speed.
  • Consider deploying more BE servers to complete backups in less duration by running the backup jobs in parallel across multiple BE servers.
• Shorter Backup Window:
  • Deploy parallel jobs from single BE server
  • Deploy multiple BE servers and configure multiple backup jobs on each server.
• Recommendations for Optimal performance
  • Only 4 to 6 backup definitions in parallel on a single BE server
  • Approximately 500 selections per backup definition
  • Maximum 35 million items per job definition across selections if running 4 backup definitions in parallel
• Make use of O365 configuration settings to fine tune the backup of very large lists and document libraries.
• Internet connectivity: Use a high-speed internet to get good Job rate for backups.
• Azure AD / Entra ID applications: It is recommended to create 5 additional applications for faster backup of SharePoint online. This option is available in context menu for M365 tenant.
• Dedup Storage Performance: For Improving the dedup storage performance we can always follow the best practices for dedup storage https://www.veritas.com/support/en_US/doc/72686287-132002191-0/v70445236-132002191