VEEAM mounts temporary disk on Windows machines

[JosVerhallen]

Hello,

We are seeing the following behaviour for Windows Virtual Machines which are backed up by VEEAM Backup & Replication:
At some point VEEAM mounts a volume in Windows and assigns it the "W:\" Drive letter. Later on this volume is removed and the "W:\" Drive is no longer available.
Our monitoring software automatically inventories monitored Windows systems and frequently gives us warnings about this W:\ drive not being present anymore.

Is this default behaviour for VEEAM and if it is, can we change this to have VEEAM use a mount point instead, so we don't keep seeing these drive letters appear and disappear?

[HannesK]

Hello,
in general, what you see is nothing Veeam does for a backup by design. Please let support investigate what it really is and please post the case number here for reference. We don't mount anything to "W:\" by design.

Just guessing: do you maybe see this mounting for Veeam proxies running in Hot-Add mode? Even for Hot-Add, there would be no W:\ but at least disk add / remove events would be normal.

Best regards,
Hannes

[JosVerhallen]

We found what was causing this behaviour.
We use Kaspersky for Anti-Virus software. Kaspersky has an option to offload disk i/o to a RAM Disk during Anti-Virus database update. This RAM disk appeared to be getting a drive letter assigned on several servers, which was the W:\ drive.

[HannesK]

thanks for the feedback - it can help other customers.