SQL and Exchange DB's attached via iSCSI Disks

[chillware]

Hello,

In our environment we use Nimble Storage, and per Nimble's best practices for both Exchange and SQL they suggest to place Exchange and SQL DB's on their own LUN's attached to the guest via the iSCSI initiator. It appears Veeam cannot see and backup data that is on those attached disks. This makes sense to me, as it's not part of the VMDK that's getting snapped and copied. In addition to our Exchange and SQL DB's, our file servers data disks are also attached to the guests via iSCSI initiators.. So, I am not getting any of my important stuff backed up w/ Veeam :_( Which I wished that it was so that I could make use of it explores and file level restores.

I am currently using Backup Exec to backup all of the data on the attached iSCSI disks, however I really want to move away from Backup Exec. So my question is, what is Veeam's recommended best practice for backing up data on attached iSCSI LUNs? I hope you have some kind of agent in the works that can grab the data, or some other awesome method of doing that..

I love Veeam, I just need it to do a little more! Thanks!

[foggy]

David, the only way to backup this data is either using vRDM (if applicable) or backup using Windows tools and then placing backups on the VM drive that is backed up by Veeam B&R.

Btw, Veeam Explorers can be used even on databases restored from third-party backups.

[chillware]

Alright sounds good, thanks for the reply. Do you think that Veeam will ever have a built in solution to this scenario? Thanks!

[t3kboi]

There is actually an official solution for this.

Attach the iscsi storage to your VM hosts, not to your windows guests.

Then add disks to your virtual machines, provisioned from the iscsi datastores.

They are now visible to Veeam, and comprehensively included in your backup sets.

Best practice - use an isolated network vlan/subnet between your iscsi storage and the vm hosts