Veeam Does not Backup iSCSI LUN under MsWindows/Linux

[stevenfoo]

We have tested couple backup, however some information are not backup.

We have couple of VM where iSCSI LUN is presented directly to the VM OS - Windows 2003, Linux.
These iSCSI was not present to ESX/ESXi host due to delay when starting up or shutting down.

All disk are selected during the VM backup selection. However these disk are NOT backup at all.

Any solution for this without changing anything on our VM?

Regards
Steven

[Gostev]

Hello Steven, no - as per Veeam Backup system requirements, such disk are not supported (they are commonly referred as "physical RDM disks"). You will not be able to backup such disks with any VMware backup product, because physical RDM disks are intentionally excluded from VM snapshots by VMware.

[stevenfoo]

Gostev,

Could we have this feature available for customer to choose in next development ?

Thanks
Steven

[Gostev]

Steven, unfortunately it is technically impossible to backup physical RDM disks on the image level, since such disks do not support snapshots. Why do you need to use physical RDM, and have you considered using virtual RDM disks instead? Virtual RDM disks do not have performance overhead comparing to physical, but provide much better manageability.

[withanh]

I noticed this as well. But I think I'm OK because that iSCSI LUN is where I'm having Veeam store the backups. It would get pretty twisted if it was trying to back up the LUN that it was backing up to. Talk about recursion

And I may need clarification, but my backup storage LUN is 4TB and my understanding is that VMware can only see a 2TB disk. Is that still correct? I guess I could make them separate disks then have Windows RAID0 them, but that seems like recursion/redundancy as well.

h