NFS / San Method

[Personne]

Hi,

I do have 3 ESX 3.5 servers attached to a NetApp FAS2050, my datastore are only NFS. This works perfectly and it is very flexible.

I have no physical connection between my Veeam backup server, and my Netapp. So when I run my Veeam Backup I got this message:
Backing up file "[NFS-DataStore01] Server1test/Serve1test-flat.vmdk" Direct SAN connection is not available, failing over to network mode...

Is it possible to use the SAN backup mode with NFS ? If yes how do I connect my Veeam backup server to my Netapp and NFS Datastore

Info:
My Veeam backup server is a Physical Windows 2003 Server with 1TB of local SATA drive
For now, my backup speed is around 15/20 MB/s with only 1 backup running. Which I think is a bit low

Thanks for your help

[Gostev]

Hello, no - only FC and iSCSI based shared storage is supported in SAN mode. Thank you!

[Personne]

Thanks for this quick and clear answer

[tsightler]

While I don't have any personal experience with this, others have indicated that running Veeam in a VM and using Virtual Appliance mode (assuming you have hot-add support) is the best performance in this scenario. The problem here is that vStorage API/VCB only supports "Direct SAN" for fiber channel and iSCSI so they must revert to NBD mode. This mode is slow in all cases, but seems especially slow with NFS.

[jai64]

I was going to try and set this up.

Does anyone have any experience with it? I have a different iSCSI device connected for my backups. Would I just set up iSCSI initiator to discover the iSCSI that is connected to my ESX servers also?

How does Veeam know where the VMs are?

Will it corrupt my vmfs volume when I connect a Windows server to it? It worries me, but I am sure it is out of my ignorance.

Any help would be appreciated.

~joe