SAN Setup Question...

[CTS-Tech]

I am setting up Veeam for the first time on this hardware:
3x Dell R710 Servers with 6 NICs (ESXi Servers)
1x Dell R310 Server with 6 NICs (vCenter & Management)
2x Dell PowerConnect 6224 Stacking Switches
1x Dell MD3200i SAN
1x Dell MD1200 DAS

Dell had me setup the SAN like this:
Controller 0 iSCSI port 0: 192.168.130.101
Controller 0 iSCSI port 1: 192.168.131.101
Controller 0 iSCSI port 2: 192.168.132.101
Controller 0 iSCSI port 3: 192.168.133.101

I have a virtual drive setup that vSphere can see called "Storage" and is for VM backups. On my R310 Management Server (where Veeam is installed) I have 2 NICs for the LAN / Management network, and 4 I can use for the Storage Network.

What is the best way set everything up for Veeam backups? I want the backups to go from one datastore to another.

[Gostev]

Best way would be to use direct SAN access mode to pull the data. The configuration is well described in the sticky FAQ topic. Some great how-tos there.

Although backing up from one datastore to another is really bad idea. You need to backup to another storage if you want to have real backups... otherwise, what you are doing cannot really be considered as backup, and can be easily replaced with periodic native SAN snapshots.

[CTS-Tech]

Best way would be to use direct SAN access mode to pull the data. The configuration is well described in the sticky FAQ topic. Some great how-tos there.
Although backing up from one datastore to another is really bad idea. You need to backup to another storage if you want to have real backups... otherwise, what you are doing cannot really be considered as backup, and can be easily replaced with periodic native SAN snapshots.

Thank you for your reply.

The Veeam backup to another datastore is just a primary backup onto slower (7200rpm) drives in the SAN. There will be a secondary backup to an external drive that will be taken offsite every day.

I configured the Microsoft iSCSI initiator and got it to the point where I can see the LUNs as Offline disks in Disk Management. But everything I am reading tells me not to put those online and format them. I can understand not doing that for the other LUNs, but for the Storage LUN that I want to backup to - won't I need to do that?

I have tried setting up a backup job with the wizard, and choose Direct SAN access. I choose the Virtual Machines that I want to backup - but when I want to choose the backup destination, it only allows me to backup to "This computer or shared folder". I don't see the option to backup to the SAN Storage LUN anywhere.

Do I need to initialize, format & give a drive letter to the Storage LUN? vSphere will not be using it.

[Vitaliy S.]

Yes, if you want to use SAN LUN as destination target for the backup job, you need to bring that LUN online and format this volume with NTFS, so it could be recognized by Windows server.