Backup virtual Storage Spaces Direct Cluster

[Daniel2]

We have a virtualised 3-node Storage Spaces Direct cluster (each node is a VM on our vSphere cluster).

The documentation says that "Host level virtual disk snapshot/restore" is not supported. "Instead use traditional guest level backup solutions to back up and restore the data on the Storage Spaces Direct volumes."
(https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/window ... rect-in-vm)

I want to make sure that I understand that correctly. I cannot make snapshots of the VM, correct? But I should be safe using application-aware processing, that does volume shadow copies (traditional guest level backup) to backup the S2D nodes? Veeam still does use snapshots, but that should be transparent to the guest, right?

[Mildur]

Application aware backups also use vm snapshots to backup the content of a vm.
I think, it‘s talking about using veeam Agents to backup the three vms. That would be a guest level backup.

[Andreas Neufert]

The issue is about snapshot timing. If you tell VMware at the same time to do snapshots, VMware do not quarantee that all 3 VMs are at the same IO snapshotted.
If you would restore form those snapshots, you basically would restore to different point in times and Storage Spaces would be corrupt.

The only way to backup this file server ( I guess it is used as file server) is to use Veeam NAS backup. VSS processing is not coordinating accross nodes, so you can enable VSS there but I don´t know if this would help really.

[Daniel2]

I understand.

I'm not using it as a file storage. It's actually a proof of concept at this time and should make a service high available that does not support high-availability itself. The service relies on a local file-based database. The idea is to use S2D to create a shared storage that seem like local storage from the services perspective. I don't think Veeam NAS backup would help in this case.

[Andreas Neufert]

There are only 3 application supported with S2D if I remember right. Filer, Hyper-V and SQL. I did not saw the SQL one in the latest Windows Versions listed as supported.
Please check with Microsoft. Maybe I am wrong and this has changed. The reason for this is that S2D is not service aware on the preferred cluster node path. The Application itself need to handle this and do an integration.

[rennerstefan]

No, in that case there is only the way that @Mildur already mentioned (using Agents) or if the application/service itself provides any kind of backup options you could also land that to a directory and backup with veeam from there.
So it's about the whole chain and picture here.