Backing up encrypted VMs

[murdocmk]

I have a customer with a few VMs that have been encrypted with Truecrypt for compliance reasons ("encrypt data at rest"). In most cases, all of the virtual disks associated with those VMs are encrypted. The boot drives (C: drives) were encrypted in-place and so despite those disks being thin disks, they take up the maximum amount of disk space at this point (free space was also encrypted). However, the non-system disks (data disks) on those VMs do remain thin because they were newly created disks that were set to encrypt data and then data was copied into them.

I'd like to get some suggestions on Veeam backup job settings. It seems that compression and deduplication will have a marginal, if any, value in this situation. I was considering creating a separate Veeam backup job specifically for the encrypted VMs and disabling compression/deduplication. I'm just looking for some validation from the community before I take that approach.

By the way, for any others considering Truecrypt for a situation like this -- Truecrypt does not support VSS on volumes other than the boot volume / system partition. Just a word of warning that your Application Processing will break if you have Exchange information stores or SQL databases on non-system disks in this scenario.

[tsightler]

I agree that it's unlikely compression and dedupe would have any benefit of such a VM so your approach sounds completely valid.