Veeam B&R - Nutanix AHV - Windows Failover Clusters

[rwgsa]

Hello,

I am new to both Veeam Backup and Replication (version 9.5) and Nutanix AHV hypervisor. I am using the Veeam Availability for Nutanix appliance on my Nutanix clusters. I am looking for some advice on how to backup a specific setup.

I am creating a new Windows file services environment on Nutanix AHV and will be using Windows Server 2016 servers configured in a Windows failover cluster. I will be using Nutanix Volumes to create virtual disks for the file (shared) storage and presenting them to the Windows failover cluster as an iSCSI target. The servers will connect to the storage using the Windows iSCSI Initiator.

I am not sure if I should use cluster shared volumes, as I don't think I will be using the Windows Scale Out File Server role.

What is the best practice approach to backing up the file services data on the Nutanix Volumes presented to the failover cluser using iSCSI? I presume I can use the Veeam Availability appliance to back up the failover cluster VMs but I expect this will ignore the ISCIS attached volumes (is this correct)?

How should I then back up the data?

[HannesK]

Hello,
and welcome to the forums. As long as you use normal shared volumes (not cluster shared volumes), you can backup your Windows failover cluster with the Veeam agent for Windows.

iSCSI targets are are like physical machines. So the "VM" needs to be processed like a physical machine.

Yes, every VM based / snapshot based backup solution (including Veeam) will ignore physical (your iSCSI) devices.

Best regards,
Hannes

[rwgsa]

Thank you, that's very helpful. Can I ask another couple of questions for clarity?

In a Windows failover cluster, when using normal iSCSI attached storage, only one of the failover cluster nodes has access to the virtual disks at any one time (with NTFS-formatted partitions). This means if you have a 3-node cluster, any one of the cluster nodes could own the virtual disks at that point in time.

How does this work from a Veeam backup perspective? Would I install the Veeam agent for Windows on all 3 cluster nodes? Do I add all 3 cluster nodes to the Veeam backup job or just add the Windows Cluster Name Object (CNO) -- the Windows Computer object that gets created with a virtual IP address, which always represents the "active" cluster node?

[HannesK]

Hello,
yes, that's "normal" cluster backup.

Please see the blogpost I posted above: https://www.veeam.com/blog/windows-2019 ... agent.html
Or this KB article: https://www.veeam.com/kb2463
and the user guide: https://helpcenter.veeam.com/docs/backu ... ml?ver=100

Best regards,
Hannes