How can I backup my VMs on the same NAS without bandwidth?

[Scottsign]

I wanted my subject to say:
If my VMs are located on a Datastore on the NAS, can I back them up to the same Datastore in a separate folder without using bandwidth?
I feel like since Veeam is installed on a physical machine that the VM will transfer over the network to the physical machine, then straight back to the NAS Datastore the way I just set it up (using a shared folder to that datastore).
I will also have other backups not located on the same Datastore, but I'm wondering if this is possible.

Also, if i have Veeam as a VM and attach an external hard drive to the ESXI host then connect it to the Windows VM running Veeam, will it still have to use Bandwidth to backup to that external Harddrive?

Basically, what's the best setup for my situation?

I'm brand new to Veeam, so please excuse my lack of knowledge.

[Shestakov]

Hello Scott and welcome to the community!

Data flow for backup jobs is always: Disk > Backup proxy > Network > Backup repository > Disk

If your proxy is connected to the storage system where VM data or backups are located you can leverage Direct Storage Access transport mode.
If you don`s have a direct access to the datastore, you can grant a proxy role to one of VMs with an access to the datastore. This way traffic also doesn`t need to go to the VBR server.

[dellock6]

In general I'd stay away from this setup at all, as you are storing the backups into the same media of the production VMs, this is a really bad practice since if you lose the array, both the copies are lost.
You said you already have backups stored in a different media, so why the need to put those into the same NAS? Performance are going to be impacted since the same hardware is going to read the production data and write the backups, regardless the network traffic created by the backups.