Currently, when a multiprotocol SVM is included as the result of adding a NAS filer, and both NFS and SMB protocols are enabled on the filer in Veeam, Veeam will attempt to backup the same underlying volume data over both protocols essentially creating duplicate backups and presumably consuming 2x the licensing (we did not validate the licensing impact, but other forum posts indicate that is the case). This is due to ONTAP adding the "default" NFS export policy on volume creation even for volumes that are intended to be shared via SMB/CIFS only when NFS is enabled on the SVM.
I have engaged with Veeam support (case #07971721) and the only workaround available is to disable NFS on the NAS filer in Veeam and then manually add the NFS-only volumes as file shares and back them up via a separate backup job. This workaround is less than ideal because in order to dynamically add and remove volumes from the backup job based upon the storage rescan, the SVM needs to be selected as the source object in the job rather than individual volumes. Leveraging storage snapshots for an NFS file share unstructured backup requires pre/post job scripting and is more complicated than being able to use the NAS filer features as well.
Alternatively, NFS can be disabled at the SVM level in ONTAP, and then setup a new single protocol SVM for NFS, but then we have to deal with the downstream impact of migrating all of the volumes and clients to the new SVM.
We believe Veeam should consider adding feature(s) to allow intentional selection of the protocol used to backup a multiprotocol NAS filer volume that addresses the duplicate backups and increased licensing consumption issues. A couple of ideas:
- Implement a NFS export policy exclusion list by export policy name. This would allow backup administrators to configure Veeam to skip attempting to backup any NFS exports with the excluded policy name ("default" in our case) effectively skipping over the NFS exports that ONTAP adds to a multiprotocol volume by default.
- Implement an option to prefer a protocol, and once a restore point for a NAS filer volume is created over the preferred protocol, skip any additional shares for that volume. In our case, we would choose SMB as the preferred protocol and have Veeam only leverage NFS when there is no SMB/CIFS share configured on the volume.