Lefthand Direct SAN Back-up

[SilentDeath]

Hello,

I'm a junior sysadmin who recently started working in a medium size company.
We've decided to set-up a new back-up server to move from vRanger to Veeam.
I'm not really a storage/back-up expert so this is a challenging project for me.

We use Lefthand storage for VMware datastores.
Our VMware cluster consists of 3 nodes (HP BL460C G6 nodes) in a C9000 enclosure. (80 VM's, 13 TB data)

I've received another BL460C G6 server which will be used as the new back-up server. (prob running WS2K12 R2)
As back-up repository, i have 2x 8.13TB RAID5 NAS available with 2GB NIC speed.

So, I have to map these ISCSi luns as read-only targets on this new server I assume?
Once mapped, does Veeam know that it will back-up directly from the SAN instead of backing up the LUNs mapped to the vCenter?
Another question, do I need another physical server to be used as a backup proxy? Or is this not necessary for my environment.

[foggy]

Hello, yes, once your Veeam B&R server has access to VMFS LUNs and you can see them in the Disk Management snap-in, direct SAN should be possible. Another proxy server may be required to spread the load, once you decide that a single default proxy (installed as a part of Veeam B&R) is not enough for you tasks.

[GarethUK]

Hello Silent Death,

This is going to sound a bit bonkers. Basically, don't touch the proxy and don't touch the Storevirtual.

From the Veeam interface initialise the repo as a veeam proxy. I suspect you've already done this.

Go into Veeam and give it administrative credentials to your Storevirtual. It will then detect all your SAN topology and volumes. From this point Veeam knows how to connect to your SAN and do the snapshots. The SAN topology detection process can take ages. This needs to be done once for each management group. Veeam will update the topology periodically.

http://helpcenter.veeam.com/backup/80/v ... _name.html

Now create a new test job so that it will use SAN snapshots. This is shown here

http://helpcenter.veeam.com/backup/80/v ... on_vm.html

Ensure failover to standard backup is not ticked.

When the job runs it will say something like creating VM snapshot Then very quickly afterwards will say removing VM snapshot. It will then start the backup process. It isn't very clear but this then means it is using direct SAN mode.

Although the documentation isn't clear the Veeam proxy seems to have the ability to connect using an internal initiator. At some point I'm sure it did use the Microsoft initiator but I'm not sure that's now true necessarily.

Regards,


Gareth

[foggy]

Internal initiator is used for storage rescan only, while for backup from storage snapshots, Microsoft iSCSI Software initiator is required.

However, I'm not sure the OP was asking about backup from storage snapshots, as he was referring to 'direct SAN' backup method.