Vm with MS ISCSI initiator

[chardolea]

HI Guys,

I have VM guest running on ESX 4, Inside my VM got Drive D LUN presented via Microsoft ISCSI initiator... Is there any possibility to backup or replicate drive D using Veeam?



Thanks,
Richard

[Gostev]

Hello Richard, what you are describing is so called physical RDM (raw device mapping) drive, which is not supported as per our product system requirements unfortunately.

[chardolea]

Thanks Anton,

Any workaround for this case, or can veeam will support this on future release.? We are proposing Veaam to one of our client, unfortunately they are using ISCSI iniator on all the VM's

Rgds,

[Vitaliy S.]

Richard,

Processing of VMs with pRDM disks is not supported by any image-level backup tools, because VMware cannot snapshot pRDM disks. If you could switch to vRDM then you will be able to perform backups of those VMs.

Thank you!

[Gostev]

Yes, this is mostly limitation of VMware, it cannot handle such disks at all (they are excluded from snapshots). Using such disks on VMs is really a limiting factor, not just for DR solutions - but for many other too (management, monitoring, reporting) as VMware has no insight into these disks. So generally, using such disks is not recommended for VMs (except by actual storage vendor).