VSAN as a backup target?

[bpayne]

Is anyone using VSAN as a backup target? If so, any pains? Looking into this for cost savings. Thank you

[dellock6]

Hi Brandon,
Since it's not a visible filesystem, the only way to use it is to deploy multiple VMs into it and use them as repository. This created additional layers that could make the recovery plan after a disaster more complicated.

What are the values you see in VSAN to think about it as a backup device?

[electricd7]

We have used it before in environments where we have 2 vSAN clusters and nothing else for storage. In this case, we created windows 2012 guests on vSAN2 which acted as a repository for backups targeting vSAN1 and vice-versa. It is a quick-and-dirty deployment which kept storage all in VMware but still separated by cluster. It is VERY EXPENSIVE repository storage, however, as you are using SSD accelerated storage to drop backup files onto. What is your goal and what are your requirements for doing this?

[dellock6]

Not to say, VMware is not giving away VSAN licenses for free... It's a price designed for a primary storage, not sure it can fit in a backup storage design, at least economically.
I may understand that the scale-out capability can be seen as a plus, but we cannot use the native filesystem, and the VM on top of it are still limited to the max size of the virtual disks. To me personally, there are other scale-out storage that can be exposed natively as SMB or NFS, and even more the new Scale-out Backup Repository, even in its first iteration, could make this kind of design less needed.