Passthrough disks and highly available file servers

[jakesterpdx]

(This is all regarding Server 2012 as both the hypervisor and the guest VM OS)

Just wanted to make sure I had this right: Veeam cannot backup a passthrough disk, right? I was going to build a clustered file server as a pair of VMs, but in order to do that the file share would have to be on a passthrough disk, and then I wouldn't be able to back up the files, right? I'm thinking maybe an alternative would be to set up a DFS service instead. Obviously this doubles the amount of space I would need (since there would be a copy of each file on each server), but at least it would be highly available and would be backed up by Veeam. I could exclude one of the VMs from being backed up by Veeam, so it wouldn't impact my backup storage, at least.

Am I missing anything here? Is there a better way to provide a highly available fileserver that's backed up by Veeam?

[chrisdearden]

Off the top of my head no - in guest initiated shared disc wouldn't work either. 2012 R2 brings the option of Shared VHDX files , but I dont know how that will work from a backup perspective. DFS should do the trick , like SQL mirroring / Exchange DAG rather than Single Copy Clustering etc would be the best way to run highly available application servers that can be backed up with Veeam.

[jakesterpdx]

Thanks, Chris!