MSCS Cluster with Volume Groups - backing up question

[Voltron]

Hi Veeam people.

I have 2 MSCS VM clusters with volume groups attached. These are file-only MSCS clusters. I have installed the Veeam Windows agents on each node and set up a backup for them.
Incidentally, there's a Nutanix Backup job configured to back up these VMs as well.

When I go into the disk backups to drill down and see the restore points, I see the multi-terabyte backups under both the Agent backup job and the normal VM backup job.
Do I need to do both, or can I drop the Agent backup and just let the native Nutanix VM backup do the job?

I do have other MSCS clusters with MSSQL on them and those I do know that I need the agents on to do VSS consistent backups, but the 2 file server clusters are my question. Am I just duplicating the backups and chewing up unnecessary spaces on my disk array?

Thanks!

[ronnmartin61]

@Voltron no I would say you do not need both native and agent backups. For clustered Windows we would recommend you stick with the agent backup approach as it has cluster-aware capabilities built in see https://www.veeam.com/blog/windows-2019 ... agent.html, https://helpcenter.veeam.com/docs/backu ... pport.html. The only slightly negative implication of the agent restore is that it is not volume group-aware and would not re-create the volume groups but rather ordinary SCSI disks as this is the disk type presented to the guest OS. The native / agentless AHV backup would re-create the volume groups on restore but isn't explicitly cluster-aware.
Same goes for your SQL clusters however note that with the v7.x AHV plug-in we did add our "application-aware" functionality which includes VSS support, log shipping, etc.

[Voltron]

So then would it make more sense to use the Nutanix plugin backup over the agent if we had a situation where the volume group had to be recreated in the event of an accidental deleted or corrupted VG?

[ronnmartin61]

Yes I suppose so if volume group preservation was a key requirement however this should be thoroughly tested as ordinary AHV VM restore does not have the cluster awareness built into the Windows agent...