Backup without a VMware Snapshot - Nimble

[dualdj1]

We restore files and machines directly from Nimble snapshots through VEEAM snapshot manager. This is beneficial for our SQL/MS Cluster servers, where VMWare snapshots can cause cluster disruption during snapshot creation/removal. The Nimble snapshots are crash consistent, and work well for our needs. I would like to request the option to backup from the latest Nimble snapshot through VEEAM *without* creating a VMWare snapshot. If needed, a new Nimble snapshot could be created based upon the protection group or volume protection settings. VVol systems would need to poll for protection group from vmware/Nimble to pull most recent snapshots. Ideally you'd be able to backup directly from snapshots on the secondary replica as well, without vcenter/primary array involvement.

[veremin]

Am I getting this correct that you want to back up on VM level, but have no VM snapshot at the meantime? Thanks!

[dualdj1]

Basically yes. VMWare's snapshot process has caused issues with our windows failover cluster stability. However, Nimble SAN snapshots of the volumes housing these machines are consistent and cause no impact on the cluster. We have access through VEEAM to those snapshots/data. I simply want to be able to copy that data through a VEEAM backup job to a VEEAM repository for an additional media location and possible archiving.

[Andreas Neufert]

No, this is not possible as we relay on the VMware protocolls for backup to understand where to read the data from the volume (it is a VMFS datastore).
Overall the goal is to keep the VM snapshot just for some seconds. This should not cause any issues. When you say failover cluster are you referencing to Exchange DAG or SQL Availability Groups or classic Failover Clusters with shared disks. Shared disks will not work with VMware backup as no VM snapshot possible. For the others I can give you some tips to make them "VMware vMotion/DRS ready" which in the end will work as well for the Veeam Backup from Storage Snapshot.

What we will offer in upcoming version is to process snapshot only jobs (snapshot orchestration) without VMware VM snapshots but with included application awareness.
You can check with one of our System Engineers if a Beta 2 test slot is availble in your region for this.

[dualdj1]

The issues we face are with the time VMWare snapshot creation takes on our AlwaysOn SQL clusters. It can take up to a minute, and while we've tailored the cluster timeout, it still can exceed that timeframe and cause the cluster services to crash or fail the node. These are using local disks only or shared disks via direct iSCSI connection from VM to SAN (not through VMWare).

Your second statement sounds more in line with what I'd like. As you're able to restore directly from Nimble snapshots, I don't see why we couldn't take data from those snaps and ship directly to a VEEAM backup file. This would also be useful in the situation where we've already got replicas shipped to an offsite array, and we'd like to archive that data from the secondary SAN to a NAS at that same location with VEEAM/Nimble orchestration at our offsite location.

Mostly, we're shifting the way we use VEEAM. Nimble has become our primary "backup" tool. VEEAM is being shifted to be archiving and recovery (ie nimble crash). We utilize the capability of Nimble SAN integration for performing restores from the snapshots, and leverage VEEAM for getting our long term data into an archive (tape, cloud, etc). It would be far more efficient for our scenario (and i'm assuming for other Nimble customers) if we could offload directly from a Nimble snapshot into VEEAM, and (at least mostly) bypass VMWare.

[Andreas Neufert]

Storage Snap to Backup offloading is something that we currently not support. The only option really to backup is I guess an InGuest Agent backup.
So you can Backup once a day with the Agent on incremental forever base
and create multiple SnapShot only Job Storage Snapshots for better RPO/RTO with v10
Would be a good combination.

The v10 feature has the only requirement that the VM needs to be in a separate Job or if multiple VMs are in the same Job then the VM disks need to be on datastores that no other VM of the same job is on.

[dualdj1]

Thank you for your time and response. Has there been any other interest in Storage Snap to Backup offloading, to where we could get a feature request put in for it?

As far as the v10 feature, that shouldn't be an issue. Thanks for the info, I have contacted my engineer.

[Andreas Neufert]

This is already a prominent feature request as medical software and real time communication server need the same approach. Based on our internal guideline we do not comment about the future versions other than the ones were betas are available.

[jmmarton]

If you have redundant Nimble arrays, you can perform Backup from Storage Snapshot using the secondary array. Even though this requires a VMware snapshot to be taken as well, at least it's not the live/production VM so it shouldn't be an issue.

Joe