vRDM backup in SAN mode on Equallogic?

[VirtuaLogic]

Hi, I have a VeeAm 5 installation which runs on a VM, which backups our entire infrastructure. Our SAN is an Equallogic PS series. VeeAm connects to the iSCSI network via the MS iSCSI initiator.

We have a few VMs which have extra disks mounted via the MS iSCSI initiator. VeeAm doesn't see these and doesn't backup them, as is expected. To circumvent this I have created a VM with a vRDM instead of the RDM via MS iSCSI initiator, and formatted it with NTFS. Veeam sees this disk and can backup it, but falls back to Network Mode when backupping it, instead of SAN Mode which works for all the other VMs.

In our Equallogic I have given the VeeAm VM IQN access to the vRDM's LUN, but am not willing to enable multiple access from different IQNs at the same time (as one does with VMFS LUNs) as this will almost certainly corrupt the NTFS volume. Equallogic does not provide a read-only setting on a per-IQN basis, only for the entire LUN. So, the LUN shows up in the iSCSI initiator list on the VeeAm VM, but is shown as unconnected, and the LUN does not show up in Windows Disk Manager.

What are my options? Do I have to accept Network Mode vor the vRDMs or is there a magic trick which enables SAN mode for these? Does VeeAm perhaps integrate with the Auto Snapshot Manager, or is this planned for a future release?

Thanks, Alex.

[Gostev]

I would go with virtual appliance processing mode in this case. Backup will still be direct from SAN, just through different iSCSI initiator.
No, we do not integrate with SAN tools, and no short-term plans.
Thanks!

[VirtuaLogic]

I tested this last night and seems to work fine, thanks. I only got an error where a snapshot could not be deleted for this VM, when I checked there was no snapshot at all. Will keep monitoring this and post if anything interesting happens.

Reported speeds vary, some VMs are slower (about 50%) to finish, others are much faster (up to 300%).

[Gostev]

No problems, great to hear it works well. Snapshot may sometimes be hidden (not in Snapshot Manager), make sure you check datastore where VMX file resides (this is where snapshot files are created by default). Also, with Virtual Appliance mode, make sure you are using latest Veeam version (5.0.1).

Each virtual disk will have different processed rate depending on its content (specifically, amount of zeroed blocks, and how compressible the content is).

[bhwong]

I just spoken to ZhiHao from Dell Equal Logic about why their SAN storage do not support read-only and read-write concurrently into the same LUN. He explained that there is no use case because Windows and Linux will never refresh a volume that is read-only until it has data to write into it. This means if we have a read-only volume mapped from Equal Logic previously, Veeam will end up backing up previous data and not current data. Is this the case?

[Vitaliy S.]

This means if we have a read-only volume mapped from Equal Logic previously, Veeam will end up backing up previous data and not current data. Is this the case?

No, this is not. Veeam will backup the most recent state of your VMs (via vStorage API for Data Protection) on the LUN mapped to your proxy server. Not sure I follow the explanation you've been given by your Dell rep.

[Starman]

Hi, I have a VeeAm 5 installation which runs on a VM, which backups our entire infrastructure. Our SAN is an Equallogic PS series. VeeAm connects to the iSCSI network via the MS iSCSI initiator.

We have a few VMs which have extra disks mounted via the MS iSCSI initiator. VeeAm doesn't see these and doesn't backup them, as is expected. To circumvent this I have created a VM with a vRDM instead of the RDM via MS iSCSI initiator, and formatted it with NTFS. Veeam sees this disk and can backup it, but falls back to Network Mode when backupping it, instead of SAN Mode which works for all the other VMs.

In our Equallogic I have given the VeeAm VM IQN access to the vRDM's LUN, but am not willing to enable multiple access from different IQNs at the same time (as one does with VMFS LUNs) as this will almost certainly corrupt the NTFS volume. Equallogic does not provide a read-only setting on a per-IQN basis, only for the entire LUN. So, the LUN shows up in the iSCSI initiator list on the VeeAm VM, but is shown as unconnected, and the LUN does not show up in Windows Disk Manager.

What are my options? Do I have to accept Network Mode vor the vRDMs or is there a magic trick which enables SAN mode for these? Does VeeAm perhaps integrate with the Auto Snapshot Manager, or is this planned for a future release?

Thanks, Alex.

Check your proxy settings. If you have more then one proxy, make sure you set the VM to use the proxy that has all the iSCSI drives on it. This is what I had to so to get SAN mode going on my Equalogic PS6500. Also, check to make sure your disks are online (like mine below).