VEEAM with HPE Simplivity & VxRail

[mnour.tamer]

Good Day ,

I have a question about VEEAM and its integration with HPE Simplivity as well as VxRail .

Current Infrastructure :
• HPE SimpliVity Server with the latest Firmware Update , This is an HCI solution with underline storage ( local SSD Drive is NFSv3 )
• VMWare ESXi and vCenter , both are running version 7.0U3
• VEEAM running Version 12

Challenge : During the snapshot removal step of a Veeam job, the source VM loses connectivity temporarily.
Potential Cause :
• Veeam does not remove the snapshot itself, Veeam sends an API call to VMware to have the action performed.
• The snapshot removal process significantly lowers the total IOPS that can be delivered by the VM because of additional locks on the VMFS storage due to the increase in metadata updates, as well as the added IOP load of the snapshot removal process itself.

Looking at many option to have this issue fixed , we are looking to have the HPE SimpliVity Servers ( replaced by another solution called Dell VxRail )

My question , what is the VEEAM Recommendation about this case and if you guys have any input about the case itself .

Do you think VxRail could help in fixing this issue .

Thanks

[Origin 2000]

None of my VxRAIL(its based on VMware vSAN) or VMware vSAN customers (using vSAN ReadyNodes) have such problems together with Veeam.

Does HPE Simplifity use such a think called "Storage VM"? Maybe you need to use fix reseveration for such a kind of VM.

Regards,
Joerg

[rennerstefan]

Hi,
as you mentioned in your case Veeam will just call APIs available on the VMware vSphere side for the Snapshot handling. All processing and depending activities are performed by VMware.
Usually you should not see significant impact as long as your system is not running on its limits already as VMware Snapshot removal always has some impact on the environment.
I would recommend to open a support case at DELL and/or HPE for them to check your system while the snapshot processing is performed to understand where your "limitation" is.
If required you can also feel free to open a ticket at our support, just to make sure all processing works as expected on our side.

Thanks

[Andreas Neufert]

Important point here is to look on what backup mode you perform with HPE Simplivity. If you use HotAdd then you need to enable by registry setting on the Veeam server same host HotAdd processing and rollout Veeam Proxies on each ESXi host. This is needed as HotAdd backup cross hosts have an additional IO overhead when you remove the mount.
Root cause described here: https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/2010953
Fixing the situation is described here: https://www.veeam.com/kb1681
Specifically check the section "Force Veeam Backup & Replication to use the Hotadd Proxy on the same host as the VM" and use option "2" there.