iSCSI Storage Configuration for Veeam

[pendragoncrw]

Good evening,

After a horrid experience with Vmware's VDR, I've downloaded a trial of Veeam and am playing with it. We use an Iomega StorCenter as our backup device in iSCSI mode.

My question is whether I should make a virtual disk that uses the StorCenter and add it to the Veeam server or whether I should use the software ISCSI initiator in Win2k8 R2 to connect to the Iomega directly?

Thanks very much,
Chris

[Gostev]

Hello Chris, I do not really understand the first option, but second option is the correct way to configure Veeam Backup server for direct-from-SAN backups. And there is another way too, if your Veeam Backup server is installed in a VM, you could use vStorage Virtual Appliance processing mode - this does not require any additional configuration at all. Thanks!

[pendragoncrw]

Our ESX hosts have local storage, not SAN storage, but our backup device is the StorCenter. I've put one VM on each ESX host and installed Veeam on it so I can use virtual appliance mode on both boxes. Performance is pretty good.

If I understand things correctly, there are two ways I can configure the iSCSI drive for Veeam to use.
1. I create a new virtual disk on the iSCSI datastore and mount that disk in the virtual machine. All done through VMware.
2. I use the Wink28 iSCSI iniator on the VM to talk directly to the StorCenter.

I was wondering if there was a preferred method.

[Gostev]

Thanks for clarification, I get it now. I did not realize you were talking about backup target.

In terms of performance, option 1 is preferred method. ESX4 has completely rewritten iSCSI initiator, and VMware had put a lot of effort in it. Very fine piece of software, nicely tuned and will beat the one found in Windows any day hands down.

I do not mean to say that Windows software iSCSI initiator is horrible, not at all - it is pretty solid - just not the best performance, and Windows getting in the way with its strange TCP "optimizations".