New vSphere new Veeam setup

[StixForBrains]

I tested previous version of Veeam and was very happy with it. I made the leap and just purchased Veeam v5 management suite. I also just upgraded my vmware environment to vSphere esxi 4.1 (previouslly esx 3.5).

This my configuration:

Main site
Two esxi 4.1 hosts
connected to FC SAN
both hosts can see all luns fine, production luns and luns intended for backups
vCenter in a vm
fresh install of Veeam backup installed in a new vm
successful pointed Veeam to vCenter, seems to recognize all my vms

Remote DR site on far side of a WAN
One esxi 4.1 host
sas connected direct to SAN

My Intent is to:
- send replicas from Main site to DR site
- do backups at main site from lun to lun, incremental for a week then remove to tape

Replication seems to work fine. Any job I try I can see and replicate to all my luns whether its local on the FC san or at remote site.
But for Backup job it gives me no storage options at all except the vdisk attached to the veeam vm itself.

What am I doing wrong?

I have a another physical windows server with a scsi tape library (from my previous backup routines) that Iwant to connect to the FC San switch to use to copy the backup vms from my backup lun to tape. I haven't set that up yet but I can't even get Veeam to SEE my backup lun in a backup job yet I've tried both san mode and appliance mode.

Any ideas?

[StixForBrains]

Clarification:
I probably shouldn't use the term Luns above. I know different sans are administered differently. What I'm refering to is the "datastores" as defined in vSphere.
I cann see all the datastores as destination for my replication jobs, but no when i try to do backup jobs. The only exception is if I create a vdisk as large as the datastore and attach it to the veeam-vm. If its attached to the veeam vm i can see it as "local drive". But then when it comes time to send to tape all the backups of different vms would be inside that one vmdk. Very awkward. Help ?

[Gostev]

Unlike replication, we do not provide an option to backup to VMFS LUNs (aka "datastores") in backup job options, because it is considered bad practice to backup to VMFS. You should backup to NTFS formatted FC or iSCSI LUN connected to Veeam VM, or to CIFS share, or to any storage attached to a Linux host. Backing up the data to disk, and then sending backup files to tape is what most of our customers are doing. Yes, you will have multiple VMs inside the same backup file, but due to deduplication, backup files will still be quite small (if you organize your jobs correctly by grouping similar VMs together in the same job). Not so sure what do you find "awkward" here. "Different" from how things are done in legacy products/approaches - yes But having to deal with a 5-10x times less tapes and spending 5-10x less disk to store current backups cannot be bad.

[StixForBrains]

Thanks Anton for the prompt replay,

After more reading, I also see why my hosts and datastores don't show up for backup jobs. I read now that esxi can still not be a backup target. The FAQ I read before final purchase of Veeam was misleading as it clearly says
"Q: Do all v5 capabilities work with ESXi, without any limitations, exceptions and remarks?
A: Yes, we fully support ESXi since version 4.1 released in December 2009."

I would have thought with vmware phasing out esx, that the claim would be true.

Ok I'm still unclear on your suggestion "ntfs formated FC lun connected to veeam VM". When I add any san logical disk as a datastore to my esxi hosts (so that the veeam vm can find it) vcenter only has two possible options for new datastores 1) VMFS, or 2) an external NAS. I don't have another NAS and I would prefer to use the faster disks on the same SAN as my production since i have lots of san disk.
How do you mean to format this as NTFS ? A large vmfs datastore with vdisks attached to the veeam vm as D-drive, E drive etc and format the individual virtual disks as NTFS? That is still NTFS encapsulated inside of a file on VFMS ?

[Gostev]

Hi Tony, correct - all advertized v5 capabilities (according to System Requirements linked in the beginning of the section) do work with ESXi. Per System Requirements, ESXi is not supported as backup target. However, I edited Q&A and removed unnecessary strong wording that may have caused this confusion to you (sorry!)

To format a volume with NTFS, you right-click it in Windows Disk Management, and choose the corresponding command. To present FC LUN to a VM (so that it appears as volume under Windows Disk Management), you should use VMware NPIV feature. Actually, this use case is also covered in FAQ, may be you have just missed it (see Direct SAN Access section).

Personally, I have never used NPIV hands on (no FC SAN around), so you may want to Google up some guides about this.

Please note however, that backing up data to the same storage where souce data is located (back to production SAN in your case) is also considered a bad practice. If your SAN starts corrupting data (which happens more often than you may think), or dies completely (multiple drives loss, flood, fire, etc), then you will have both your production data, and your backups gone - and will not be able to recover. That is unless of course you are additionally planning to sync backups to a secondary storage (preferably offsite).

[StixForBrains]

The disk array for the backups are entirely different spindles from the production luns. Same san yes, I'm not worryed about that. Because as per my first message I'm also doing replicas with multiple restiore points to a remote SAN. The backups are to be spun off to tape and taken off-site. Even with a second san, if the first san starts corrputing data then the backups will be corrupt as well.

Ok I'm not familiar with NPIV I'll read up on that. Yes I know how to format a volume in windows as NTFS, but that "volume" is virtual, just a file (vmdk) inside a vmfs datastore. You already said that vmfs is an unreliable and unsupported target? No ?

[Gostev]

I never suggested backing up to volume which is VMDK inside VMFS LUN (datastore). What I suggested above is backing up to NTFS LUN attached directly to VM as RDM (raw device mapping) disk. This is what NPIV allows you to do, and this completely removes VMFS from the picture.