Backup fall in network mode

[pierpaolo.degrandis]

Hi,
I've installed a lot of Veeam Backup on our customers ESX infrastructure,
but in last month I see some errors that I never see above:

Backing up file "[ds2] Windows Server 2008 R2 Enterpris/Windows Server 2008 R2 Enterpris-flat.vmdk" Direct SAN connection is not available, failing over to network mode...

This happens casually on:
different VM
different hosts
different Datastore
different Infrastructure (different customers)
different SAN models

The only common value are:

VMware version is vSphere 4 upd 1
Veeam backup version 4.1.1

My backup is using vStorage API mode.

Any Ideas ?

TIA

[Vitaliy S.]

Hello,

The actual failover from vStorage API SAN mode to vStorage API Network mode may happen when either SAN access is not configured properly or direct connection to SAN fails due to infrastructure connectivity issue. So you need to check that SAN connection is properly configured, or use vStorage API Network mode. By the way, if you're running Veeam Backup in a VM, we recommed using Virtual Appliance mode.

Thank you!

[pierpaolo.degrandis]

> The actual failover from vStorage API SAN mode to vStorage API Network mode may happen when either SAN access is not configured properly or direct connection to SAN fails due to infrastructure connectivity issue.

The SAN is correctly configured, in fact the problem happen casually only sometimes, So the other times it work correctly using SAN.

Maybe my problem is not clearly explained:
I always used Veeam (from almost 3 year from version 2) in SAN mode (before using VCB not using vStorage API) so I know how to configure it and how to configure SAN. This problem appear only with version 4.1.1 and vsphere 4 upd 1. I don't know if this is an conincidence...

Have you some ideas ? (some hidden parameters, timeout or other ?)

Bye

[Gostev]

If the issues are sporadic (only happen sometimes), then they are likely connected with the underlying storage infrastructure problems. SAN connection is established and managed for us by VMware vStorage API, which is still the same in 4.1.1 as in the previous 4.1 release; so I doubt this issue has anything to deal with version 4.1.1.

If you do not want jobs to fallback to Network mode, you can choose "SAN only" option. Our automated job retries should help with sporadic storage access issues.