B&R not able to see VMs volumes connected by FC

[icn2]

Hi all,

We're deploying a pilot project in our company with B&R and a Hyper-V cluster (2012 R2) with CSV. B&R has visibility on all volumes and VM configured on our Hyper-V hosts.

The thing is that the application has no visibility with the volumes that the VMs has directly attached by FC to the Storage System.

So, we cannot backup the volumes related to Exchange Mailbox, SQL or File Server because of that. I believe this may be normal since the Hosts (where the off-host proxies has been installed) don't have the visibility of these volumes.

Could anyone help us in this scenario? I believe there's an alternative scenario which is mapping the volumes via Hyper-v, but we understand that with this way we lose throughput to write/read to the volumes.

Thank you all.

[Vitaliy S.]

Hello,

If you have any volumes directly attached from the guest OS in the VMs, then it will not be possible to back up this data with Veeam B&R. In order to back up these volumes, they should be present in VM configuration like regular virtual disks.

Thank you!

[nmdange]

Any particular reason you are using virtual Fiber Channel? If it's for guest clustering, since you are on 2012 R2, you can use Shared VHDX instead.

[icn2]

We're using a bonded 32 Gbps FC link and we don't want to lose performance when accessing volumes.
I believe using shared VHDX instead of vFC would decrease performance (since the traffic should cross the Host and be processed by it). Am I right assuming this?

Anyway, we've already deployed 2 SQL Cluster, 1 File Server cluster and 1 Exchange DAG with 2 Mailbox servers. They are not yet in production, how traumatic would it be to turn the volumes from vFC to shared VHDX?

Thank you all for your replies.

[Vitaliy S.]

According to this topic there would be some penalty in terms of performance, however you need to see what performance you will have with your own hardware.

Also, this post can be a useful reading > Virtual Fiber Channel or Shared VHDX Cluster?

[alanbolte]

To clarify that post - Veeam offers no support at all for backing up data on vFC, but data on shared VHDX would be backed up in crash-consistent mode, which is less than ideal. For example, you would not be able to perform SQL log backup, nor truncation of transaction logs on SQL or Exchange.