Backing up StarWind VSAN for vSphere targets

[albrow]

Hi everyone

We've been going through the process of migrating from our ageing EqualLogic boxes to a new hyperconverged setup running StarWind VSAN for vSphere. So far StarWind have been very helpful with setting everything up for us. However, we have hit a problem.

Unfortunately it seems that StarWind VSAN for vSphere only allows connections from the ESXi iSCSI Initiator, meaning I can't use a Veeam proxy running on Windows to connect to StarWind targets. As a result, it looks like I can't use SAN backups anymore. Even with the new SSDs we have, I'm worried our backups are going to slow down.

Has anyone found a way around this? Alternatively, what's the best alternative to SAN backups?

And finally, could someone from Veeam maybe give StarWind a nudge about getting SAN backups working on VSAN for vSphere? Surely I can't be the only person that wants to do this?

Alex

[haslund]

A great option would be to have a virtual backup proxy on each vSphere host leveraging the virtual appliance (hot-add) transport mode.

[albrow]

Thanks for the reply, Rasmus. I already have one proxy for each vSphere host, so that would work for me. Would there be much of a speed difference between direct SAN and hot-add? Would I lose any functionality?

[KOOLER]

@albrow This is a (pretty questionable...) limitation within StarWind VSAN for vSphere and I've already told my guys to flex it out. You'll be contacted with a private fix and we'll embed it into newer versions.

Thanks to @haslund aka Rasmus for brining our attention to the issue!

Anton

[haslund]

Thanks for the reply, Rasmus. I already have one proxy for each vSphere host, so that would work for me. Would there be much of a speed difference between direct SAN and hot-add? Would I lose any functionality?

Actually, leveraging virtual appliance mode (hot-add) means you can leverage the Veeam Advanced Data Fetcher. The disadvantage is you are using CPU/memory from the production host that could otherwise potentially be used by production VMs. By using physical backup proxies this load is fully offloaded.

[albrow]

Anton: I had a message from one of your guys (Roman, who has been very helpful over the past week with setting up VSAN) with the private fix. Backups are now working using Direct SAN mode, but we are now getting some latency issues that seem to coincide with backups (they go away when switching to Veeam's hotadd or network modes). I'm guessing there might be some changes that need to be made to the Windows iSCSI Initiator. I'll get back in touch with Roman to see what can be done.

Rasmus: We've got plenty of spare CPU in the cluster, so I don't mind using some of it for that. If I switched to hotadd, how many cores should I allocate per proxy? Also, I've seen some (older) blog posts that say I would lose CBT by using hotadd - is that still the case and does it matter that much? And is there still the risk of orphaned snapshots with hotadd?

At the end of the day, I'm happy to go with whatever Veeam and StarWind recommend for our setup. With the old EqualLogic boxes there was a clear benefit to using Direct SAN mode. If that's not the case with StarWind VSAN for vSphere then that's fine by me.

[albrow]

Actually, ignore me about losing CBT - I misread the page.

CBT is disabled if you back up proxies that use Virtual appliance (HotAdd) mode to process VM data.

https://helpcenter.veeam.com/docs/backu ... l?ver=95u4

[KOOLER]

OK, we've changed the code to allow non-ESXi connections to StarWind service. Please get your new binary and talk to your sales rep to acquire an updated license key as this functionality is controlled from there. Let us know what you think. Thanks! Anton

[oscaru]

hi @albrow

Was the limitation on the Linux VSA version of StarWind VSAN for vSphere?

I've been using SAN mode with StarWind Vsan for a few months without problems, but I use StarWind VSAN on top of a Windows Server VM.