EMC AX4-5i iSCSI and Win2k8

[orion2598]

Hello,

We are having issues getting Veeam to see the LUNS correctly. Windows Server can see them and shows them in disk manager. However, Veeam cannot perform a SAN backup from them. Running vcbsandbg gives an error that the lun does not contain any VMFS/LVM signatures.

We're using the MS software iSCSI initiator along with EMC's powerpath. The EMC software shows the LUNS correctly, but something just doesn't line up here.

Veeam support wasn't able to offer much other than to contact EMC, but surely someone is using Veeam Backup with an AX4, and I'm wondering if anyone out there has any ideas?

Thanks in advance,
Greg

[Gostev]

Greg, try to upgrade PowerPath to the latest version, reboot server and see if vcbdiag starts seeing those LUNs. This helped at least once (there is even post about this somewhere on this forum).

If this does not help, try removing PowerPath completely, reboot server and see if it helps.

These problems are often resulted by multipathing software not behaving correctly.

Additionally, if everything above fails, try to change Veeam Backup and FastSCP service account to LOCAL SYSTEM, and see if it helps. I've seen it help on one SAN (can't remember what was that), but apparently (what I believe happened) SAN permissions system was deeply integrated with Windows/AD, and because access permissions were granted to backup server, LUNs were readable only using LOCAL SYSTEM account (which in turn uses computer account for all remote operations).

Just some ideas, hope they help. EMC support would definitely be able to assist you better and faster with this specific issue though, because it is their SAN and their MPIO software. I am sure they have seen thousands of similar cases by now (VCB is out there for many years), so this should not be hard for them to resolve. And with VCB diag failing, it would be hard for them to point fingers at us. They could try to point at VMware and VCB issues, but VMware is EMC anyway

[orion2598]

Thanks for the tip Gostev. Updating PowerPath from 5.2 to 5.3 SP1 resolved the problem and everything is working great now. Thanks!
Greg

[Gostev]

Glad you've fixed it! Thanks for getting backup with the update too.