Failed backups due to pRDM or Independent disks

[BenConrad]

From what I've read Veeam backup won't backup a disk that can't be snapshotted (pRDM, IndependentPersistent virtual), that's fine with me. We set certain disks to pRDM or IndependentPersistent because we have large amounts of data (databases) living on these volumes. We don't want a snapshot to capture the changes happening in these volumes as that has potential to eat up a lot of VMFS space and the snapshot deletion is problematic on huge snapshots. Our DBAs do a great job backing up our database servers.

Anyway, B&R skips these disks but sends a failure. This is not a failure, it's to be expected that B&R skips the disks. Why is a failure email sent for this backup?

BackupDisk failed
Client error: Failed to open VDDK disk [[MYVOLUME] myvm_1/myvm_2.vmdk] ( is read-only mode - [true] )
Failed to open VMDK.
Logon attempt with parameters [VC/ESX: [myviserver];Port: 443;Login: [mydomain\mylogin];VMX Spec: [moref=vm-855];Snapshot mor: [snapshot-1703];Transports: [nbd]] failed because of the following errors:

Server error: End of file

So, did this backup complete successfully?

Ben

[Gostev]

Ben, VCB has functionality to automatically skip such disks and you will not see the warnings; however vStorage API does not have this functionality. To not get failures, you should exclude pRDM and Independent disks from backups in the advanced job settings.

[BenConrad]

Thx,

Does the 'Network Backup' backup mode support skipping these disks?

I can't exclude the disks in the job because it seems this software doesn't support per-VM disk exclusions. We can't simply select every disk higher than 0:0 as that will skip many app/web VMs that need those drives backed up. I guess I can create folders or resource pools and put all my SQL servers (for each cluster) in there but I don't think it makes sense to model the VI around a backup strategy. Plus, what If I want SQL ServerA to backup 0:0 and 0:1 but SQL ServerB only to backup 0:0. The only way I see this working is if I create a job per sql server (we have 68 SQL servers at the moment).

When will B&R support per-VM skipped disks?

Ben

[Gostev]

Ben, you can just create a separate job with all SQL servers added (assuming they have the same disk configuration), no need to create folders if you only have only certain number of servers with pRDM or Independent disks.

'Network Backup' mode should skip those disks correctly too, but for performance reasons I highly recommend using vStorage API based backup modes.

Per-VM skipped disks is actually planned for the next release.