Get creative! Veeam + Nimble - ways to go about?

[benbour]

Hello all.
I am in the processing of designing a new domain with all new servers to coincide with a new office being built. It's running on Nimble and I was looking at how I have it set up, and I keep second guessing myself:

I have a main volume that gets presented to vCenter and is for generic servers and other Server's OS drives. I also create specific volumes for applications (Exchange stuff,sql stuff, sharepoint, Windows FS, etc.)

I use Nimble connection manager to present the specific volumes directly to the guest, with performance policies set for what they are holding. I was going to use RDM but Nimble has some known issues with VSS and RDM, hence the direct connection.

All snapshots will be taken by Nimble.

The snapshot that runs on the main volume is easily mounted with Veeam since it has Operating systems on it, and I can see them when the snapshot is selected in Veeam. The application specific volumes though, I can't do anything with besides just see them there.

The way I understand it, this is a limitation of the integration:
https://helpcenter.veeam.com/docs/backu ... tml?ver=95

So I can see 2 options to remedy this:

1) Make RDM volumes and have the each Virtual Server sit on it's own (I'll have to solve the VSS and RDM issue for this to work though)

2) Veeam removes limitation, allowing me to mount a standalone snapshot of say a file server data volume and perform a guest file level restore without having the OS on that volume.

Thoughts? share your setups!

[foggy]

I'm not sure vRDM will work either. Only VMDK are supported with storage integration.

[benbour]

Hmm. I'll make a new VM with RDM and test a snapshot to see what it looks like in Veeam.

Here's a post with performance tests for the 3 methods (NCM, RDM, VMFS):

https://connect.nimblestorage.com/thread/1660

If RDM does work, I'll have to look into cloning the vmdks like this:

http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/smb-te ... to-an-rdm/

Although I'm on 6.5 and not sure if this procedure has changed.

I wonder, would a separate VMFS datastore for each VM really make a noticeable difference in performance? I know it does add an extra layer (Nimble-vCenter-Guest) rather than Nimble-Guest. But would I really see a difference in a smaller organization? If not, this would be the easiest way to transition over since I could use vMotion and have complete Veeam integration.

[benbour]

You are correct that RDM will not work either. So my options become quite limited.

[JoshuaPostSAMC]

Do you really need an RDM at all, or have a specific reason to not just use VMDK and let Veeam handle it direct? Then you only need the Nimble software on the VMware host and not in each VM.

I don't notice any difference between a dedicated datastore for each VM vs combining them, but if that is your intention, then check out vVols, which is effectively that without so much management overhead.

[Delo123]

Ditch the RDM's, nothing can be gained by using them instead of issues...