VEEAM 6 and NFS Support?

[CarlConstantine]

Just noting something I saw in a recent mailing about features in the upcoming VEEAM v6. From the newsletter:

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A few short announcements from me. First, as we are approaching next major version release (scheduled for Q4 this year), I would like to remind about upcoming feature loss. Starting v6, legacy transport modes (VMware VCB based, and service console agent based) will no longer be available. The only reason we kept these modes in v5 was to ensure smooth transition to vStorage API for Data Proteciton for the existing customers, as some needed to go through internal vStorage API certification process first. We hope this transition is now over for most of you (this looks to be the case according to our support statistics).
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What does this mean for those of use that use NFS as the backbone storage for vSphere? VMWare themselves recommend NFS for storage (it's in several white papers available for download). We don't use iSCSI or any iSCSI appliances of any kind.

I don't know if this affects those of us using NFS with VMWare or not, but thought I'd put the question out there.

[Gostev]

Hi Carl,

This does not affect you anyhow. With NFS production storage, for best performance you should be using Virtual Appliance processing mode, which is vStorage API based. What job processing mode are you using today?

On a separate note, would you please share the papers where VMWare recommends NFS for storage? My impression has been exactly opposite: VMware has always treated NFS as second-class citizen. Even by looking at famous vSphere 4.1 bug around NFS and CBT.

Thanks!

[CarlConstantine]

We're not using an appliance. We're using a dedicated server running windows Storage server 2008 with VEEAM 5, stored in a separate building and backing up over 100MB connection.

VMWare has a few white papers on NFS.
- VMware vSphere™ 4: Exchange Server® on NFS, iSCSI, and Fibre Channel
- Best Practices for running VMware vSphereTM on Network Attached Storage

Both are available as PDFs.

[J1mbo]

The thing about iSCSI is that is offers no advantages over NFS, where the same is not true the other way around. On the wire, the protocol overheads are near identical also.

NFS got a bad reputation I believe because of unaligned guest partitions of older OS's - when benchmarking such a configuration with mixed random IO where writes straddle underlying file system blocks, for whatever reason I found there was a queue-depth throttle going on that totally strangled performance. But with alignment sorted the performance is superb even with an old server re-purposed for it. Even iSCSI die-hards EqualLogic are moving into the NFS space now.

[Gostev]

I believe, the bigger issue with NFS is security. NFS v4 has this addressed, however VMware only support NFS v3 (again - 2nd class citizen thing).

[CarlConstantine]

J1mbo, that's one of the reasons we align all our RAID arrays. This is a good thing to do regardless of underlying architecture and such, the OS writes also get quite a speed boost from a properly aligned system.

anyway, this goes back to my question about the next VEEAM and NFS support given my parameters?

[tsightler]

NFS will still be supported via vStorage API just as it is today with V5. The supported vStorage API modes for NFS are Virtual Appliance and Network (NBD) mode. These modes will continue to be supported with V6.

[fsecchia]

Hi, we're using virtual appliance mode to backup several NFS datastore with the current 5.0 release.
Anyway we do see some real benefits, In our enviroment, to be able to to the same thing using the physical windows 2008 R2 server we're using for backing up the SAN volumes:

1) saving microsoft licenses
2) having few administration points

so this is something that we would like to see in a future release.

[tsightler]

Hi, we're using virtual appliance mode to backup several NFS datastore with the current 5.0 release.
Anyway we do see some real benefits, In our enviroment, to be able to to the same thing using the physical windows 2008 R2 server we're using for backing up the SAN volumes:

1) saving microsoft licenses
2) having few administration points

so this is something that we would like to see in a future release.

Sorry, but I'm not sure I'm following. What exactly do you want to see? You can currently use a physical Windows 2008 R2 server to backup an NFS datastore via vStorage API Network Mode (NBD) although performance is probably not the best. You will still be able to do with with V6.

Are you saying you'd like to be able to leverage "Virtual Appliance" mode with a physical server?

[J1mbo]

...in a recent mailing about features in the upcoming VEEAM v6. From the newsletter:
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legacy transport modes (VMware VCB based, and service console agent based) will no longer be available...we kept these...in v5...to ensure smooth transition to vStorage API for Data Protection for the existing customers
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Can I ask, how are these legacy modes configured in V5? As I only see Direct, VA or NBD.

You can currently use a physical Windows 2008 R2 server to backup an NFS datastore via vStorage API Network Mode (NBD) although performance is probably not the best. You will still be able to do with with V6.

Good to know. I get about 70 to 80MB/s sustained in this configuration, which seems to be limited by the target (which has only a pair of old Xeon 5110s in it). I like to keep things simple

[foggy]

Can I ask, how are these legacy modes configured in V5? As I only see Direct, VA or NBD.

Please take a look at Veeam B&R User Guide (p.18) for description of the legacy backup modes. Thanks.

[J1mbo]

Many thanks.