Video surveillance footage and excluding a volume

[HendersonD]

Currently we have 4 virtualized video surveillance servers running under ESXi 6.0. These servers use Windows Server 2012 R2 with the C: drive sitting on a VMFS datastore. We present to each server a large (40-50TB) physical RDM where the video surveillance is stored. We purchased new hosts running ESXi 6.7 and are thinking about using VMFS datastores for video surveillance footage instead of RDMs. We DO NOT want to every backup the video footage but we do want to backup the video surveillance servers themselves which is just the C: drives.

I know with physical RDMs, Veeam will never back them up which is fine. Is there any advantage to switching to VMFS datastores for this purpose? If we do switch, and attempt to exclude the VMFS datastore where video footage is stored, does Veeam always honor this? I know the first part of a VMs backup process is to have VMWare take a VM snapshot. We do not even want to snapshot the volume where the video surveillance is stored.

[Gostev]

Just make this VMDK independent in VM settings, and it will be excluded from VM snapshot by VMware. Veeam does have an option to exclude arbitrary virtual disks from backup as well, but in this case you won't even need to use it, because the disk will not be included into the VM snapshot - which makes it impossible for Veeam to back one up (the backup job will simply skip one). Thanks!