Veeam Environment Planning

Before you deploy Veeam Plug-in, keep in mind the following requirements and limitations.

• RMAN Channels and Resource Consumption
• Veeam Backup Job Name
• Hosting Environments

RMAN Channels and Resource Consumption

Any parallel channel started by RMAN will use one Veeam backup repository task slot. By design, Oracle Standard Edition can work with one channel. Oracle Enterprise Edition has the option to use multiple channels and you can configure them in the Veeam Plug-in configuration wizard or at the ALLOCATE CHANNEL definition in RMAN scripts. It is recommended to carefully plan repository task slots, so that Oracle RMAN can work with multiple channels in parallel when configured.

The following hardware resources are recommended based on tests on Skylake processors:

• Oracle server: 1 CPU core and 200 MB of RAM per currently used channel. Note that resource consumption on the Oracle server depends on hardware and Oracle settings.
• Backup repository server: 1 CPU core and 1 GB of RAM per 5 currently used channels.

These resources are recommended only if you use a dedicated backup repository for Veeam Plug-in backups. If you use the same backup repository for Veeam Plug-in backups and VM backups created by Veeam Backup & Replication or Veeam Agents, consider adding the mentioned above hardware resources based on usual load on your backup repository. For details on hardware requirements for a backup repository, see the System Requirements section of the Veeam Backup & Replication User Guide.

We recommend to contact your Veeam system engineer to optimize the channel settings and resource allocation. Also, consider the following:

• It is recommended to use a separate backup repository for Veeam Plug-in backups.

• The control file does not use a repository task slot and will be processed even if there are no free task slots.

• Veeam Backup & Replication server: during manual metadata operations such as import of backup files, the Veeam Backup & Replication server needs additional 15 GB of RAM per 1 million files located in the same backup job folder.

Veeam Backup Job Name

• On the Veeam Backup & Replication server, the backup job name will be created automatically based on the server or cluster name and selected repository.
• For environments that use Oracle RMAN copy processing, one job per repository is created.

Backup Files

• A .VAB file stores a compressed copy of an Oracle database. Veeam Plug-in creates .VAB files for both full and incremental backups.

• A .VASM file stores metadata that contain information about the backup. A .VASM file is created for each .VAB file. The .VASM files are used by Veeam Backup & Replication to get data about Veeam Plug-in backups.

• A .VACM file stores metadata of a backup job object.

Hosting Environments

By default, Veeam Plug-in uses the Oracle server hostname to create a Veeam Backup & Replication job object and backup folder. To be able to distinguish individual servers, it is recommended to set the following entry within the Veeam configuration XML file: <PluginParameters customServerName="hostname.domain.tld" />

• [Linux or Unix]: /opt/veeam/VeeamPluginforOracleRMAN/veeam_config.xml
• [Windows]: %PROGRAMFILES%\Veeam\VeeamPluginforOracleRMAN\veeam_config.xml

If your servers that have the same hostname in multiple environments, you must add the following entries in the plug-in configuration file: