Backup VM with NFS mounted volume

[ToniVR]

Hi,

We have a virtual server (VMware, NFS datastores) in production which uses an NFS volume (mounted inside VM) on our NetApp to store a bunch of files (> 10 million).
The VM itself is +/- 20GB in size, the NFS volume is 1.4TB.

If we run a backup on this VM, it can only backup the VM itself, but not the NFS volume.
Pretty logic as vSphere has no knowledge of this volume. So we don't blame Veeam for this result.

We have NetApp storage integration in use for all our backups.

The question is: As Veeam has NetApp integration to create snapshots, can we somehow enhance the backup job so that:

• the NetApp snapshot is taken on both NetApp volumes (the one with the VM and the one with the millions of files)
• the backup also includes the volume with the files and not only the volume with the VM

If we can create a snapshot of both volumes together, that would already be a big help. but it would be much nicer to also have the data volume.

Thanks for any suggestion.

[Naim]

An easy way to take a snapshot of both is to share that NFS volume out as a Datastore to vSphere as well. Once the Datastore is in vSphere you then create a dummy VM - create a VM of any sort and just don't install anything. So when you do that you effectively have a VMX file and thats it.

You then create a Veeam Backup Job of the Dummy VM and then ensure that you configure the Veeam job to do the NetApp snapshot.

So what the above achieves is Snapshot Orchestration of the NFS share/volume via Veeam. That is snapshot only, so the challenge from there is to get the files to tape or to stream them to a backup target, unfortunately you can't do that with Veeam (possibly could if you used mixed permissions and CIFs, but with millions of files, not going to be good at all).

To achieve your requirements you could create a job to take Backups of both VMs and Veeam will tell NetApp to snapshot both volumes.