Seeking Clarification on VMware Restores with Excluded RDMs

[enoobmot]

Today we use a lot of raw device mappings on our VMs (generally if a disk is 500 GB or greater, although I think this was an old way of thinking). The RDMs are mapped in VMware as Physical, so I don't believe that Veeam backs them up or even tries to.

However, Veeam does backup the rest of the drivers (VMDKs) and reports successful backups.

Now I have never tested this and fortunately have never needed to, but would a restore actually work on these VMware guests?

[foggy]

While physical RDM's are skipped during processing, you can restore other VMDK disks processed by the job just fine.

[Vitaliy S.]

Also please be aware that these disks are excluded from VM configuration too, so if you want to reuse these disks (for example, when restoring to original location), you will need to re-attach them manually.

[dellock6]

And as an additional suggestion, I would highly consider to stop using RDM for single servers at least, in these days it doesn't make any sense and you are only missing their protection as they cannot be backed up. Migrating them to vmdk is a really simple process:
http://www.virtualtothecore.com/en/howt ... vmdk-disk/

Luca