It is not possible to make a backup copy of physical drives

[petr]

Hello!

I try to make a backup of the virtual machine,
but job faled. The virtual computer consists of 3 hard disks: one virtual hard disk, and 2 physical drives connected from storage. At attempt to make a backup copy through VMware Consolidated Backup in SAN mode, backup complete succesfully, but there is no backup copy of hard disks connected via storage.
At attempt to make a backup copy through VMware vStorage API in SAN only mode backup job faled with next error:

Backing up file "[LUN23] srvdb2.agrocom.biz/srvdb2.agrocom.biz_1-rdmp.vmdk" BackupDisk failed Client error: Failed to open VDDK disk [[LUN23] srvdb2.agrocom.biz/srvdb2.agrocom.biz_1.vmdk] (is read-only mode - [true]) Failed to open VMDK. Logon attempt with parametres [VC/ESX: [esx-vc01]; Port: 443; Login: [agrocom\support_1]; VMX Spec: [moref=vm-1478]; Snapshot mor: [snapshot-1629]; Transports: [san]] failed because of the following errors: Server error: End of file

Please Help me someone!!!

[Gostev]

Hello Petr, backup of physical drives is not supported - please refer to product's system requirements in the Release Notes document for supported VM disk types. Thanks!

[petr]

Whether and you can advise what or resources for creation of backup of virtual machines with the directly connected physical drives via SUN. I want to use only one software to do backup virtual machines if it possible. And whether this function in the following versions Veeam Backup will be realised? Thanks!

[Gostev]

Unfortunately image level backup software will not be able to provide this feature any time soon. This is limitation of VMware, it cannot handle such disks at all (they are excluded from snapshots), so they simply cannot be processed with image-level backup tools, which rely on snapshots.

[petr]

What soft you can to advise to do backup physical drives directly connected via SAN on Virtual Machines?
Thanks!!

[Vitaliy S.]

Hi Petr,

I think you should try an "old-school" backup vendor that is using agents in the guest OS and do not perform image level backups.

However, assuming we are talking about physical RDMs, I think you may try convering pRDMs to vRDMs, that will allow you to perform backups:

http://communities.vmware.com/thread/102246

http://kb.vmware.com/kb/1006599

Thanks!