Restore of Entire VM & Virtual RDM through Veeam?

[mdornfeld]

I've already submitted a ticket to support (#507983), but I wanted to see what people on the forum are doing. We are using Virtual RDM's. For instance, the OS will be on a standard thick VMDK, but the the data partition will be on a virtual RDM (to take advantage of thin provisioning of our SAN).

When Veeam backs up the RDM pointer file, it appears to back it up as though it was a thick vmdk, not just a pointer to the virtual RDM. This runs us into problems when we try to restore an entire VM & RDM. It will try to restore that pointer file that VMware uses as thick vmdk, thus throwing our thin provisioning out the window.

I guess I'm looking for what the restore process is for restoring an entire VM and Virtual RDM via Veeam?

Thank you to anyone that can help with this.

[Gostev]

Matt, the main issue here is that you are using thin-provisioning. Veeam Backup does not fully support thin-provisioning at this time (we will be addressing this in the next release). But with the current version, Veeam Backup is able to backup such disks and perform file-level restore, but in case of entire VM restore, such disks will be restored as thick (flat) VMDK. Thank you.

[mdornfeld]

For those interested, Ben from Veeam support also said this of Virtual RDM's:

I have been working on this with our engineers and product team, and unfortunately at this time, we can only create a flat .vmdk at this time. When we read the vRDM’s we process them as flat vmdk’s therefore the restore is flat (which is the difficulty we have been encountering), and our dedup and compressions engines require this. When we can have the restore engine create vRDM’s or thin-provisioned vmdks, then we can address this configuration. I am sorry to be the bearer of this fact, but our development is always working towards the next step in being the best backup possible for VMware environments. [...] we are unfortunately unable to work with these disks properly. I am looking forward to when we can.

Best regards,
-Ben

[mdornfeld]

Gostev,
I am glad to hear you are working on this for the next release. I can't wait to see this feature implemented!