Veeam, Hyper-V and IBM Storwize V7000 Hardware VSS

[burak.bas]

Hi,

Is there anyone using IBM Storwize V7000 Hardware VSS and Veeam Off-Host Proxy together? I would like to use it but I am not successful. It is not related to Veeam, but I hope that someone is successfuly using VSS backup with IBM Storwize and Veeam. I have three Hyper-V nodes with two CSV volumes which one is 4.9 TB and the other is 4 TB. I did the following steps but I have not made it worked

* I have installed IBM Hardware VSS on all Hyper-V hosts and the off-host proxy
* I have created two snapshot volumes in same size as CSVs (I see them with "ibmvcfg list free" command)
* I have created VSS_FREE (WWPN: 5000000000000000) and VSS_RESERVED (WWPN: 5000000000000001) dummy hosts
* I have mapped snapshot volumes to VSS_FREE

When I try to backup VMs using IBM Hardware VSS, I get "not enough target volume" error in VSS log. Someone is familier with this error?

Any help will be appreciated...

[tysw]

i'm actually trying to do this exact same thing as well and would be interested to see some feedback.
@burak.bas why do you need to create the dummy hosts?

[burak.bas]

Hi,

I exactly don't know. When the snapshot volumes are free, they are mapped to the VSS_FREE dummy host. When the snapshot volumes are using by a backup, they are mapped to the VSS_RESERVED. You can set their WWPNs in IBM VSS software (ibmvcfg command) or you leave them in default which is 5000000000000000 and 5000000000000001. It is by design, I think.

[Vitaliy S.]

Are you able to use software VSS writers or yo have the same error message that there is lack of free space on the host?

[tysw]

So i did get this to work in my lab. It was relatively straight-forward to setup and i did not encounter any issues.
I'm running 7.6.1.4 code, and using the latest hardware vss provider. i did notice in the changelog for the new vss provider (dated june 10, 2016) that it fixed some issues that other storwize + veeam admins were seeing so if you are using an older version of the provider you may want to try that.