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SeRo
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DirectNFS + Linux-VMs

Post by SeRo »

Hello everyone,

I got a question about DirectNFS transport mode when backing up linux vms.

In your helpcenter I found the following sentence "If you enable the Enable VMware tools quiescence option in the job settings, Veeam Backup & Replication will not use the Direct NFS transport mode to process running Microsoft Windows VMs that have VMware Tools installed."

Source: https://helpcenter.veeam.com/backup/vsp ... ccess.html

To backup a linux virtual machine you have to enable that option. What configuration should I use to backup Linux VMs with DirectNFS transport mode?
csydas
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Re: DirectNFS + Linux-VMs

Post by csydas »

Hey SeRo,

That is a super weird sentence, and I'm hoping a green poster can clarify this, but I understand that to say that for whatever reason, if there are Windows Machines included in the job AND you enable the VMware quiscence, these Windows Machines (with the VMware tools) won't be backed up using DirectNFS.

It sounds to me like you need to segregate your *Nix and Windows VMs if you're using DirectNFS.
tsightler
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Re: DirectNFS + Linux-VMs

Post by tsightler » 2 people like this post

SeRo wrote:In your helpcenter I found the following sentence "If you enable the Enable VMware tools quiescence option in the job settings, Veeam Backup & Replication will not use the Direct NFS transport mode to process running Microsoft Windows VMs that have VMware Tools installed."
Direct NFS transport mode has one limitation that other backup modes do not have, it cannot backup VMs that have existing snapshots. This is due to the fact that Direct NFS does not use the VDDK, but rather, as it's name implies, reads the VMDK directly from the NFS datastore and cannot do so with the delta files used for snapshots, only the base VMDK.

Normally, this isn't a problem, but if you have Windows machines, and you enable VMware tools quiescence, the quiescence process for Windows takes a VMware level snapshot, then Veeam takes a snapshot, but because the VMware quiescence process has already created it's snapshot, it's immediately a VM with an existing snapshot. This extra snapshot does not occur with Linux VMs when VMware quiescence is enabled.
SeRo wrote:To backup a linux virtual machine you have to enable that option. What configuration should I use to backup Linux VMs with DirectNFS transport mode?
I'd say that you don't have to enabled this option. Even with this option it's still a crash consistent backup and I know that most people actually don't use it. Pretty much all current Linux filesystems are journaling and will recover with no loss of consistency, the only real difference is that the state might be from a few seconds before the snapshot is taken if the journal has to roll back transactions.

However, if you are more comfortable with enabling it, there are still options. As previously noted, you can of course split Windows and Linux into separate jobs but there can be an even better option. With Windows, Veeam has our own guest processing which can be enabled. If you enabled this feature it takes precedence over VMware tools quiescence, so the Windows VMs will use Veeam guest processing and Linux VM will fall back to using VMware quiescence, and Direct NFS will work for both in the same job.
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