Quick: Why not to buy the iomega ix4-200r for veeam backups
In previous blog posts (Using veeam to backup the new virtual infrastructure to Iomega NAS boxes and Backup Strategies with Virtual Machines in VMware using Veeam) I mention my purchases of the iomega ix4-200r, generally I haven’t been impressed with them because they’ve been a little unreliable.
Looking at use around the net I decided that the best way to have a target for my veeam backups would be the iSCSI initiator from Windows straight onto the device, so I should provision a LUN, add it to Windows and write to it.
I tried and failed, after about a week of to’ing and fro’ing with veeam, vmware and iomega support I got to the bottom of the issue: these nas boxes are software locked to provide LUNs that are <= 2TB in size* – bearing in mind my 8 file servers each serve up anywhere between 500GB and 1TB worth of data this means that my first backup file from veeam is always going be over 2TB, making the device pretty much worthless in my environment.
*I’ve been assured that a LUN that’s exactly 2TB will work, although I can’t actually get that working in my test lab having tried it on two separate devices.