Windows Storage Spaces

[orangeTANG]

Are there any limitations using Windows Storage Spaces inside a Windows 2019 Guest VM? Considering using storage spaces instead of Dynamic Striped Disks to use 2 vDISKs to make 1 logical drive (for performance reasons). Some Google searches suggest that Veeam can only do full drive restores, and not single file restores out of Storage Space volumes but these posts are a few years old.

I just like to know if there's any limitations from the Veeam backup side (specifically AHV) before we decide to follow Storage Spaces instead of Striping per MS current best practice.

[Andreas Neufert]

It is not supported by Microsoft to use storage spaces in VMs and therefore our VM file restore and applications do not support it.

[orangeTANG]

Andreas - thank you for the response. I did see references to that but they were quite old, I was unsure if that was still the case. I did set up a test in my lab and I can confirm that Veeam does not see the volume created in Storage Spaces to do file level restores.

What is odd is I see MS articles suggesting the use of Dynamic Striped disks are depreciated, and 3rd party references to Nutanix shift to Storage Spaces for vDisks: https://www.derekseaman.com/2019/02/win ... tanix.html

I do have a ticket open with Nutanix to understand their best practice, but regardless I cannot go that route since Veeam doesn't support it.

[Andreas Neufert]

I checked with latest Microsoft documentation and for "Storage Spaces" I did not find any new documentation that it would be supported within VMs. It has still a strict requirement for Storage Controllers one HCL.
Maybe a Microsoft Advisory case can bring some light into it.

However I saw some "Storage Spaces Direct" on Azure documentation, but it speaks about Multi Server distributions which do not allow us to backup and restore them on image level.

However if you have specific data within Storage Spaces or Storage Spaces direct and you want to backup those on file backup level, you can use our NAS backup solution (Backup SMB share).