Direct storage Snapshot

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I was able to add 2 physical servers for to my proxies environment to allow for direct storage snap on my EMC unity. I actually had to add the servers in as regular proxies and as VMware proxies in Veeam so I could select them from the proxy list in the job settings. I think this is normal? If I just added the proxies as non VMware they would not show up on the list in the job.

All said and done, it is working, but does not seem any faster from our method before ( virtual proxies on each vm host.

I tested with a few active fulls with and without the direct storage snap box checked and they were literally done seconds from each other. Should it actually be faster, or is it more of a solution for not interrupting the vm or host while the snap is made or deleted in a traditional VMware sense and freezing the vm.

I did notice that the proxy we were using for direct storage access did have a ton of Ethernet traffic once the job started, so I was wondering if maybe it was still falling back to network/Ethernet?

Maybe we were just expecting lightning speeds?!

Any insight would be great

[Mildur]

Hi Ryan

I actually had to add the servers in as regular proxies and as VMware proxies in Veeam so I could select them from the proxy list in the job settings. I think this is normal? If I just added the proxies as non VMware they would not show up on the list in the job.

Yes, VmWare Proxy is required. Backup Proxy is not required for VmWare Backups.
A Backup Proxy is used for NAS, File share or physical agent backups from storage snapshots.

Should it actually be faster, or is it more of a solution for not interrupting the vm or host while the snap is made or deleted in a traditional VMware sense and freezing the vm.

Backups from storage snapshots helps you to reduce the time a vm is running on a VM snapshot. Especially database server with a lot of changes while the backup is running requires long snapshot consolidation times at the end of the backup.
With storage snapshots, a VM snapshot gets created, then the storage snapshot. As soon the storage snapshot is created, the VM snapshot gets removed and veeam can read the data from the storage snapshot.

Beside the storage snapshot integration, there is the direct storage access transport mode. If it‘s faster or not depends on your environment. If you think, it‘s to slow, check the bottleneck information for the job in the veeam console.

Thanks
Fabian

[foggy]

Check the particular VM backup session log for the transport mode that is effectively being utilized during backup - you can see it right after the proxy name: [san] for direct san mode, [nbd] for network mode. The event of storage snapshots creation in case of storage integration is also logged in the session log.