What mode of backup to use?

[dexterstu]

Just wondering what type of backup I should use in my environment?

I have about 12 Virtual Machines, sitting on two physical ESX4 hosts connected to an iSCSI SAN. I would like to backup these VMs to an NFS NAS, which is mounted as a datastore for both of these hosts. I do not have a physical machine to install Veeam on - it is running from a VM at a completely different site (quite far away with a high latency).

Am I able to initiate the backup from the Veeam server, and have the ESX hosts backup directly to the NAS without proxying through the Veaam server?

[Gostev]

Hello Stuart, yes you can backup directly from ESX to NFS, but this will not give you very good incremental backup performance (incremental backup speed will be faster than full backup, but not significantly).

To do this, you should use Network processing mode (3rd radio button on processing mode selection step). NFS NAS should be added as storage to either ESX host, then you will be able to select it as a destination. Finally, make sure you have service console connection settings provided in the ESX hosts' properties (right-click ESX in the Veeam Backup Servers tree). In such setup, backup will be direct from ESX to NFS NAS, without proxying through Veeam Backup server.

But for best performance, I recommend installing Veeam Backup in a VM on those ESX hosts, and using the vStorage API "Virtual Appliance mode".

[dexterstu]

Thanks Gostev. I have now set this up in a VM on one of the hosts and am using the vStorage API mode. It is successfully backing up the VMs on the same host as Veeam, however fails on the VMs stored on the other host. Is there a way to fix this?

[Gostev]

Stuart, you should connect all LUNs of your iSCSI SAN to the ESX host running Veeam Backup VM. Looks like this is not the case right now - and this ESX does not have access to disks of VMs running on another host.