Simple Question

[mvidito]

Hi I am totally new to this Veeam solution and just have a pretty simple question.

Looking at purchasing the new Veeam Backup Essentials Starter for VMware and wondering if your software will also backup normal data and not just the VM machines? If yes I am assuming as it works closely with VMware that it will back up data that is presented to the VM hosts, IE: HP P2000's etc.....?

Any info on this would be much appreciated.


Thanks,

Mike

[Gostev]

Hi Mike, our software is for backing up virtual machines only. Thanks!

[mvidito]

Thanks very much for the quick response!

[mvidito]

Just one other question, if I present disks via ISCSI to the host and this in turn creates a VMDK file (virtual disk) that your product backs these VMDK's up as well?

[Vitaliy S.]

Disks that are presented to the host via in-guest iSCSI initiator (the same refers to network shares) cannot be backed up, as these disks are not "visible" on VMware level.

[mvidito]

BUT if they are presented directly to the host can they be backed up with VEEAM? I realize that if they are presented directly to the VM server via ISCSI Initiator within Windows 2008 that they are most likely are not visible through VM and have to be replicated with another type of software like Storage Mirroring or Double Take.

Does this make sense?

Thanks,

Mike

[Vitaliy S.]

Yes, if these disks can be snapshotted, then these VM configurations are supported.

See our system requirements document for further info > http://www.veeam.com/veeam_backup_7_0_r ... tes_rn.pdf

[mvidito]

Thanks for the info that document was very informative!

Just wondering one other thing and that is does anyone have experience with doing snapshots using this VEEAM software? If I wanted to create a ISCSI link directly from say a P2000 to a VM host and say it's 1TB in size can this be snapped every 15 minutes as it should just snap the difference at the block level? Or does it have to re-snap the whole 1TB VMDK file?

Thanks very much in advance for all your help everyone I really appreciate it!

Mike

[foggy]

Veeam B&R does not snapshot anything, it just issues a call to VMware to perform the snapshot of the entire VM. So if you can snapshot this disk manually using vSphere Client, Veeam B&R will successfully back it up.

After the snapshot is created, only changed blocks are copied each time during the job run. Ability to backup VM every 15 minutes depends on the amount of changes generated by the guest OS (i.e. the ability to commit the snapshot after backup).