Hybrid VM Backup + CIFS File Share Backup

David Yon · Post by **David Yon** » Dec 08, 2011 9:41 pm this post

Ok, dumb question of the day...

I've got situations in a few SMB customers where they are looking to deploy vSphere Essentials to virtualize servers and some workstations. Veeam is an obvious fit to handle backup of the VM's.

But they also have a small NAS (Openfiler in one, a QNAP in the other), and plan to keep that around to handle some of the more pedestrian file shares. Which begs the question of how the data on the file shares gets backed up. Keep in mind that the VM's can see the file share, but the share itself is hosted on a physical server.

Can Veaam handle that somehow? Backup the VM's plus the physical file share? I've searched quite a bit and have come up empty.

Post by **Gostev** » Dec 08, 2011 10:06 pm this post

Hi David, would the File Copy job we provide work for that? That is the only thing that comes to my mind.

David Yon · Post by **David Yon** » Dec 09, 2011 12:22 am this post

It would work, but at a far reduced level of functionality than what B&R provides---no history, cataloging, easy restore, etc. They'd be just as well served by the QNAP backup, which is basically a Web UI wrapper around rsync. I was hoping to provide an all-inclusive central place to manage backups.

Back to the drawing board on that...

chrisdearden · Post by **chrisdearden** » Dec 09, 2011 9:04 am this post

You could always virtualise the openfiler

Post by **tsightler** » Dec 09, 2011 1:18 pm this post

Funny, I was going to suggest the same thing. The next option is to create a VM that you rsync the files from these external device to, and then backup that VM with Veeam for archival purposes.