Environment Setup

[asloan]

Hey guys. This is my first post on the forums but have been looking at the forums for the past few days. I can't wait for v6 to come out.

But on to the question:

My environment consists of a Dell MD3220i storage as the shared storage for vSphere and a Dell Powervault NX3000 going to be used as the storage for Veeam backups. I would like to install Veeam on the Powervault since it has dual quad core cpus and can use those for optimal compression. But if I install Veeam on the physical server, what would be the best backup method to use? I have seen that the MD storage has support for the vSphere API for Storage Awareness but not the vStorage API for Data Protection which would be best to backup. Would I be able to use the backup method that utilizes the ESX I/O stack by having Veeam installed on a physical machine?

Thanks guys

[Vitaliy S.]

Hello Alexander,

Assuming that you have an iSCSI SAN (Dell MD3220i), you definitely want to use vStorage API Direct SAN mode to backup your production VMs. vStorage API for Data Protection is an interface provided by VMware which have to be used to backup VMs, so there is nothing to do with your storage specification.

Please check out our F.A.Q. for more information how to configure your server to work in direct SAN mode: [FAQ] v5 : Frequently Asked Questions > Answers

Thank you.

[asloan]

Thanks Vitaliy. Fast response as usual.

I always thought that the vStorage API was dependent on the type of storage that you had. But that sounds great if it isn't.

Thanks so much.

[Gostev]

vStorage API for Data Protection (which is what we are using) is not hardware dependent. You are probably thinking about vStorage API for Array Integration. This one is, in fact, hardware dependent. Having VAAI-enabled SAN does help, but is not required with Veeam.