Anyone using Veeam and Nimble Storage Snaps?

[DSF767]

Hi,

We just installed a Nimble Storage SAN about two weeks ago and now that everything has settled we were talking to them about turning on their array based VMWare Snapshots. When we got to talking about VMWare they mentioned how they use VMWare snaps to quiesce the VM only and they don't touch the CBT tracking at all which as you know Veeam needs to do its nightly backups. The guy I was talking to says they do have people using both Veeam at night (10PM - 3AM) and run Nimble snaps during the day to help (8AM - 8PM) get RTO's down.

It's not that I don't trust them I just want to get others experience with this because what I don't want to happen is for the nimble snaps to change VMWare's CBT tracking and then have my Veeam backups failing or worse saying they are successful and they are actually not consistent because we are using more then one product using VMWare snapshot functionality.

Thanks in advance.

[tsightler]

CBT information is tracked by VMware and is really just a history of changed blocks between snapshots. CBT is designed so that multiple external applications can request CBT information without impacting the other. The only exception might be if some application "resets" CBT, but then Veeam just falls back to a full scan and that would be obvious. But you shouldn't have any problems running Nimble snapshot in concert with Veeam snaps, although I do think it's a good idea not to allow them to overlap, just because having two applications creating and removing snaps on VMs at the same time is less than ideal.