Direct SAN access requirements

[marius roma]

Where cvan I locate a complete list of the requirement to implement Direct SAN access?
Is it available in all Veeam B&R versions and releases?
Regards
marius

[PTide]

Hi,

Yes, it is available in all Veeam versions starting from 6.0 and all editions. Please check this article for requirements.

Thanks.

[marius roma]

Many thanks!
marius

[Zew]

"ESX(i) hosts via FC or iSCSI."

No NFS with VAAI?

[PTide]

No NFS with VAAI?

For VMs that reside on NFS storage you can leverage Direct NFS access feature. vStorage API for Array Integration can be leveraged only if Veeam requires ESXi host to trigger it. For example that can happen if you clone a VM or zero-out blocks on the datastore. In case of a replication, backup or backup copy job the data will flow via Veeam agents that are located on Veeam infrastructure components (e.g. proxy, repo, gateway, WANacc) thus VAAI can not be used. If you meant something else then please elaborate.

Thank you.

[Zew]

Well in an All-in-one (just a virtual veeam server sitting in the same production cluster as all other VM's) it'd be nice if veeam could utilize the Datastore of teh hypervisor its directly sitting on. E.G Veeam VM sits on ESXi hypervisor which happens to have a VAAI enabled NFS datastore (this is where all VM's VMDK would reside, and probably the vmx files and what not) and you happened to have a dedicated LUN on this same SAN (very unlikely to be the case, but lets say in a really small business enviro they have one really redundant SAN that happens to have VAAI support) that it could not copy the VM's files form one LUN to another on the same SAN... then this....

Ahhh crap... you can't use VAAI offloading on a SAN while the VM is on, it goes back to using the vmkernel datamover instead of VAAI...

Why did I pick NFS! I'm questioning this choice everytime!