Veeam backup using Fiber Channel LUNs

[wanman0621]

I am new to Veeam and have installed Veeam v5.01 on a Physical Server running Server 2008 R2. There are 2 Fiber Channel Cards that connect to a Fiber Channel NAS.

I was informed that with Windows, it is recommended not to create any LUNs greater than 2TB (not even with GPT), so I carved up my NAS into 2TB chunks. So now I have 8-2TB LUNs that are visible from the Veeam Server.

Is there a way that Veeam can use these LUNs as 1 Pool of space?

[joergr]

Hi,

I´ve been using a 8TB GPT based Partition in my w2008r2 machine for the veeam backup store for about a year now - no probs at all.

Windows 2008 R2 do NOT have any problems with that - of course it HAS to be GPT based! The only reason which COULD come to my mind was if your san vendor would tell you this special SAN has problems delivering LUNs larger than 2TB to a windows system.

best regards,
Joerg

[foggy]

Danny, you can present multiple 2TB LUN's to your Windows host and span the volumes. Also, this topic might be useful to you. Thanks.

[wanman0621]

Thanks for all the replies. I think I'm going with the 18TB LUN. I'll test using this configuration and if all goes well, we'll move forward.

[Gostev]

Way to go! This is whay I would do. I assume you meant 16 TB, as this is the max NTFS volume size with 4K cluster. Thanks.

[wanman0621]

Good point, however I'm using a 64K blocksize because Veeam will be writing very large files to this volume.

check this link--> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison ... note-55-20

If I'm understanding correctly (Click on footnote #21), its saying that the NTFS Driver on Windows NT limits the maximum volume size to 226TB and the maximum file size to 16TB. I would imagine with Server 2008, this would be greater, but I wouldn't go that route unless I found some Microsoft documentation that said it was ok to do so.

If you have documentation to the contrary, please send me the link.

Thanks.

[Gostev]

That's right, with larger NTFS block sizes you can have larger blocks, absolutely. Just wanted to make sure you realize you need to format with larger block size in this case.