Cisco UCS - Grant VM access to the direct attached FC LUN

[saintdle]

In Veeam, you can backup directly from a VMFS volume so long as you allow the Veeam Backup Server direct access to either iSCSI or FC LUN, it doesn't need to be mounted by the windows server, just available.

I have an environment with a Cisco UCS Chassis, where by the Fibre Channel Ports of the SAN are directly plugged into the Fabric interconnect (FC switching mode configured). The ESXi hosts are able to see the LUNS and use them as VMFS volumes.

However my veeam backup server is a virtual machine, and I would like that to be able to see the FC LUNs presented to the ESXi hosts so that I can do a direct SAN backup.

With iSCSI this is easy enough as I can add a Virtual Port Group into the iSCSI vSwitch, and add a networking adapter to the virtual machine, configuring the SAN to allow access.

With FC it looks harder, I have figured out that NPIV is enabled by the FI's by default in FC switching mode, meaning I can present an unused LUN to the ESXi hosts and the VM, and map it as a RDM. However this is not what I am trying to achieve, I want the VM to be able to see the existing LUNs used by the ESXi hosts.

Thanks in advance

[foggy]

Dean, direct FC SAN access from virtual machine wouldn't have much sense, since will not avoid ESXi stack. You'd better use hotadd in this case.

[Vitaliy S.]

I think the only way to achieve your goal is to use DirectPath I/O for passthrough access to an HBA, but as foggy said it would be easier to use hot-add mode.

[saintdle]

I am playing with passthrough at the moment,

hot add will be the next step, but this is a nimble SAN, so I want to take advantage of the integrations coming in 9.5 you see, and backup from storage snapshot you see

[foggy]

For backup from storage snapshots you need a physical proxy as well. Having a virtual proxy doesn't make sense in terms of a data flow (access stops to be "direct"). Here's another related discussion.