I'm confused by this behavior in Veeam. Assume a backup job is being ran against VMs in a vCenter environment. One VBR server, one vmware backup proxy (preferring the hotadd transport mode), and a VCSA with ESXi hosts.
My understanding is basically the following when a VM is being backed up:
- Veeam B&R server communicates with the vCenter and handles all snapshot creation/deletion and reconfiguration of disks on the backup proxy VM.
- The backup proxy connects to TCP port 902 on the ESXi hosts to download (at the very least) VMX files from the ESXi host directly.
- The backup proxy reads the disks that have been attached to it and makes the backup files (including compression/dedup/encryption) before sending onward to the gateway servers/WAN accelerators/repos.
As a human operator, I can easily connect to vcenter and download vmx files through the vcenter web UI so I don't think there is a specific limitation here as support suggested.
I'm having difficulty understanding the product limitation or design decision here. Hoping someone can explain it better than support. The documentation is weak on this nuance.