Direct san and proxy selection method

[Henrik.Grevelund]

Hi,

I am having some trouble with backing up some large VM's and would to know how Veeam is suppose to select the Proxies during backup.

I have 4 proxies(3 linux, 1 windows), each proxy has a number of unique LUN's assigned. about 80 each.
Each proxy is set to Direct SAN, and allows failover NBD if datastore not available.

The backup job is set to automatic selection of proxy.
The backup job has 1 VM, this VM has 12 harddisks. 11 harddisks are available on proxy 1, the 12. is available on proxy 2.
How is Veeam supposed to select proxies for this job ?

Second backup job also allows using all proxies.
It has 40 VM's with harddisks on all datastores spread on all 4 proxies,
How is it supposed to select proxies for this job ?

[Andreas Neufert]

When you start a job, Veeam collects the information of the VM disks and their datastores. Reads then the datastore volume identifiers. When a backup of a specific VM disk starts, we (through VMware VDDK kit) check each proxy for the specific volume ID. If there are more than one Proxy found the load balancing algorithm will choose a proxy based on Proxy load for the processing.

If you add new volumes (LUNs) to the Proxy, remember to run a rescan or wait 4 hours so that the Veeam software will know about the new volume.

In general I would give all the Proxies the volumes. That way our software could spread the load across all of the Proxies better.

[Henrik.Grevelund]

Hi Andreas,

I really don't understand why it doesn't use the knowlegde of LUN access to select the proxy ?
The proxy is set to use SAN connection, so it should only be selected if it actually is able to backup the VM.

I going to have access to 6 different storage systems, around 300-350 LUN's. Most of them has 8 access path's, resulting in at least 2400 device paths.
That is not going to go well if i assign all to 1 proxy.

The VMware team are using storage DRS, so it would be extremly difficult to create jobs taking account to the proxy LUN's since it could be placed in several.