How would storage snapshots affect Veeam?

[pswiatek]

Hi All
Quick question, we have a file server, with a drive attached on the VM that is 4TB in size.
We have had to recover the server recently and it took 48hours to storage vmotion the machine back to the SAN from the respository.

We would like to protect the server with SAN Snapshots in addition to Veeam B&R, to allow us to recover the machine quicker.

The server is windows 2012, and the large drive is on its own Datastore/Lun, and the SAN in question is a Nimble Storage Array.

I would assume, the act of taking snapshots should not affect Veeam, but what would a restore do? I imagine CBT would have some issues.

We are on Veeam 9.0 Up1 and ESX 5.5 U3.

Cheers,

[Gostev]

Hi. You are right, backups will not be affected. I would advice against restoring the entire LUN though. Most likely, you will have a number of issues if you restore a non-application-aware LUN snapshot. One "classic" example is ruining your Active Directory due to a USN rollback issue. Thanks!

[pswiatek]

In our scenario, there is only one vmdk file on the lun, and it is not Primary OS drive for the VM. It is just large drive NTFS drive with files and file shares.

Would we need to disable CBT for the VM, before reverting that VMDK? and then let Veeam perform a Full backup next window?

[Gostev]

You will want to perform an Active Full backup in any case, and this will take care of establishing the new CBT reference point.

[pswiatek]

Perfect, thanks.