Veeam as VM, Direct San Access, FC attached Storage

[sirhideo]

Hi,

We are going to deploy 2 ESXi servers with direct FC channel to HP MSA 2040 (no fabric switch at the moment). Veeam B&R will be running as VM on one of the hosts.

Since our production network is still 100Mb and it is required to run replication or backup during business hours. Direct SAN Access will be everything to us..

However, in order to achieve Direct SAN for production backup, how can Veeam VM (Windows 2008) that resides in one of the ESXi host sees the ESXi shared LUN via FC channel? Should I create a port group for Veeam VM and connect it to MSA2040 LAN port by using iSCSI with the LUN share as wwn and iqn instead?

Thanks a lot!!!

[dellock6]

Hi,
if the SAN is connected via FC you cannot reach it via iscsi... The possible solutions you can do is to increase the network to 1G and keep virtual proxies (this will also benefit all the VMs using that network, 100mb is pretty limited these days) or you need a physical Veeam proxy connected to the FC, but since you are using direct attach, I suspect you already used all the available FC ports on the HP SAN for the ESXi hosts.
Network upgrade is probably the best solution here.

[sirhideo]

Thanks dellock6. Does it mean, regardless how fast my LAN is, it is impossible to have Direct SAN access when:

1) Veeam B&R is deployed as VM
2) ESXi connects to SAN via FC channel?

[dellock6]

You can maybe do it by using NPIV (virtual FC connection published to a VM), but honestly since the backup is going to be saved from the Veeam VM to an external storage via ethernet anyway, I don't see the benefit if at the end the backup is going to cross anyway the 100mb network...

[gooey]

Hi,

I'm new here and to Veeam.

Is it possible to use virtual backup proxy and SAN snapshots.

I have configured NPIV on the backup proxy and mapped LUN's to the proxy.

I have installed Veeam and setup the proxy with access to my SAN, which in looking at the SAN it looks like the proxy is logged in and has valid paths.

The proxy can create and delete SAN snapshots.

The proxy does not see the mapped luns in disk manager, so something must be wrong. When scanning a lun the proxy displays an error "unable to bind to any host"

Is anyone using a Virtual machine backup proxy with san snapshots. Oh yeah I'm using 3Par.

Thanks in advance for the input.

[veremin]

May I ask you why you don't want to use some physical machine as both proxy and repository servers and connect it to the said device via FC? This way, you will get sheer networkless backup path. Thanks.

[gooey]

I can do a physical machine if that is the only way. A VM is just the most logical.

[veremin]

You can leave backup server as a VM and use it afterwards as Hot-Add proxy, should need be. The physical server will play the role of proxy for storage snapshot backup and repository, guaranteeing fast networkless backup.

[foggy]

Basically, virtual server can serve as a proxy for storage snapshots. If everything is configured as required, please contact technical support for verification of your setup.

[dellock6]

A VM is the most logical if you want to use hotadd mode, but if the entire goal is to leverage Direct SAN to avoid data crossing the hypervisor layer and go straight from storage to Veeam proxy, to me it makes no sense to have a virtual proxy, this one in this case is the "non logical" design. The shortest path is a physical proxy conneted to the same storage fabric of the production array, being it FC or iSCSI. Sorry for being a bit rude, but a virtual proxy managing direct SAN backups is a non-sense.