Add san storage directly to veeam

[baber]

Hi

I am using unity 600 as SAN storage now since I know there is a feature in veeam that we can directly add unity600 to veeam backup and replication
now 2 question :

1- Can i get backup from each vm in this mode?
2- can i create jobs and put a couple of vm in that ?
3-Do i had to add my vCenter or my esxi to veeam b&R if i want add unity600 to veeam or just need add one of them to veeam ?
4- which one is better for get best performance ? Add vCenter to vm for get backup and select vm from vCenter ., .... or add unity600 to veeam ?

BR
Babak

[Andreas Neufert]

1- Can i get backup from each vm in this mode?
Yes, as usual. You will find information here:
https://www.veeam.com/backup-from-stora ... shots.html
https://helpcenter.veeam.com/docs/backu ... l?ver=95u4

2- can i create jobs and put a couple of vm in that ?
yes, as usual... see the second link above with configuration details.

3-Do i had to add my vCenter or my esxi to veeam b&R if i want add unity600 to veeam or just need add one of them to veeam ?
Without vCenter or ESXi host connection you can not backup VMs. So add vCenter and the VMs. The backup from storage snapshot is an extension that uses storage snapshots additionally to reduce the VMware VM snapshot livetime.

4- which one is better for get best performance ? Add vCenter to vm for get backup and select vm from vCenter ., .... or add unity600 to veeam ?
So this depends a bit, but usually to read directly from the storage is faster than through VMware.
We have a good best practices entry that discuss this:
https://bp.veeam.expert/proxy_servers_i ... _snapshots
https://bp.veeam.expert/proxy_servers_i ... sport_mode

As a rule of tumb... when you have very low change rate (below 1%) then NBD is the fastest backup mode as it has less overhead in processing.
If you have a medium change rate with a block storage and no issues arround VMware snapshot and disk hotadd... use HotAdd (Veeam Virtual Appliance mode). For NFS use Direct NFS in same situation.
If you have a high change rate or high change rate during backup window, have issues with stunned VMs at VMware SnapShot commit then go with Backup from Storage Snapshot.

You can combine those in your environment as needed.

HotAdd has an overhead in processing the disk hotadd. This takes some seconds where NBD network mode could have already backed up the VMs with low change rates.
Backup from Storage Snapshot need to calculate the changes to the new storage snapshot/clone and has as well some overhead for it. So if you have a huge change rate the faster backup processing lead to smaller backup window... if you have very low change rate the calculation lead to higher backup window.