GPT File-Level Restore in Veeam Backup and Replication

[darrellarbaugh]

Is GUID partition table (GPT) file-level recovery in the works presently, or on the roadmap for delivery/development? A file server with a drive > 2TB seems to be more pervasive as virtualization continues to grow. With the arrival of inexpensive 1TB SATA drives, everyone has gone crazy with DAS RAID configurations and storage allocations, leaning toward "if some is good, more is better." Seems that in the storage hungry world we live in, that GPT is the way of the future for Microsoft servers as we work toward file server consolidation.

As I've stated before, I enjoy working with the product and have partnered with and installed several competitive products in the past and have found Veeam appears to be the lead dog at this stage in the race. So, if there is anyone who would care to give an update on this from a technical perspective and the challenges for adding this feature for Veeam Backup and Replication, I'd like to hear from you.

[vbussiro]

Isn't the 2TB disk (vmdk) limit a VMFS limitation ?
Anyway GPT support might help in some case.

[Gostev]

Darrell, we are monitoring feedback and as always we are ready to add support for any feature which has sufficient number of requests. Right now we consider GPT support "nice to have" and not a priority, because we are not seeing it widely used. Also frankly this is probably first request for this feature. Just to give you idea, some other features were requested 100 and more times and these are the features we are concentrating on for the upcoming releases.

vbussiro you are correct, 2TB VMDK is VMFS limitation.

[darrellarbaugh]

Wow. That's really surprising. Our clients are moving to GPT, not only for the 2TB limitation, but for boot table redundancy at the begining and end of the disk.

[thuizenga]

I also find myself looking for this as i have been using GPT servers for some time now. I was surprised to find out that it's not supported and now i am left with a bunch of servers that i need to perform multiple backups on.

[tsightler]

We also have a few servers using GPT in our environment, but currently they are physical servers so Veeam does not really apply. However, I can easily see this becoming an issue as we continue our consolidation plans. Veeam should certaily have GPT support on the roadmap.