SAN snapshots are not used even if non-SAN disk is excluded

[achernin]

Hello,

All my VMs have their disks on HP StoreVirtual cluster, and backup jobs use SAN snapshots as expected - except for one VM that also has a disk on another storage. This disk is excluded from backup job, and "Remove excluded disks from VM configuration" is checked, but the backup job for the VM still uses Hot Add.

Am I missing something in the job configuration? User guide says that SAN snapshots are used for VMs that have all their disks on supported SANs, but I thought the backup engine would check for excluded non-SAN disks before deciding whether to use SAN snapshots.

Thanks!

[foggy]

Aleksandr, even if you exclude disk from the backup job, the snapshot is still taken against the entire VM and includes all VM disks. What kind of storage is the excluded disk stored on?

[dellock6]

we disable BfSS if some disks of a VM are on non-accelerated storage arrays, because it will be not possible to close the vSphere snapshot before the end of the entire VM backup; so there is no need to stress the storage with an additional san snapshot.

Luca.

[achernin]

Aleksandr, even if you exclude disk from the backup job, the snapshot is still taken against the entire VM and includes all VM disks. What kind of storage is the excluded disk stored on?

The excluded disk (non-system disk of Windows 2008R2 server VM) is on the NFS storage provided by EMC VNXe 3100.

[foggy]

Aleksandr, QC has just checked this on the current Veeam B&R version and disk exclusion should work. In case where VM has several disks residing on different datastores (some of which are not supported by backup from SAN snapshots), NBD or hotadd transport mode will be used for the entire VM backup. After excluding all disks that reside on unsupported datastore, backup from SAN snapshots is used (assuming there are available slots on proxies supporting this kind of backup).

If you're observing different behavior, please contact technical support for investigation.

Thanks!