Nimble SAN and Veeam

[JRH]

Hi,

Just interested to hear from anyone with a Nimble SAN using Veeam. I have a new Hyper V Cluster and also a new CS240 SAN. To my knowledge veeam and nimble together go against each others best practices (nimble recommend in guest iscsi and veeam can't back that up).

So any advice on how you are achieving backups with Veeam, are you going with just CSVs and no in guest iscsi? Does this degrade performance on the Nimble or cause support issues? E.g Nimble have a couple of performance policies for Exchange but I wouldn't be able to use them (would have to user Hyper V CSV) as they will ultimately be a VHD in order for Veeam to back them up.

Also in terms of Nimble snapshots, are you ignoring Nimble VSS and having the Nimble take just crash consistent snapshots? Are you able to have veeam use the Nimble hardware snapshots (off host)?

As mentioned, any advice, gotchas etc very much appreciated!

James

[dasfliege]

Same Problem here...
If you use nimble with Veeam, you have to attach your additional volumes via a VHD(x), as Veeam is not able to backup Guest-LUN's. We were already in contact with nimble SE's to clarify this issue and you gain only around 3% Performance if you use Performance policies for SQL/Exchange. That's not really much compared to the complexity you have to deal with, if you use Guest-LUN's.

Hardware VSS Provider is not working until now. At least we weren't able to get them running. Seems like we have to wait until nimble and Veeam startto work together...