Nimble as Backup-Target over iSCSI - Best practice

[unbreakable]

Dear Veeam Community

We plan to use a Nimble Storage as Backup-Target. It is connected to the network over iSCSI (Jumbo Frames activated). We have a VMware Infrastructure with 4 Nodes.
Now we have two different options to connect the iSCSI LUN to the infrastructure:

1. Connect the iSCSI LUN directly into a virtual windows server. Format the disk as ReFS 64k
2. Connect the iSCSI LUN to the VMware hosts and put the virtual machine's virtual disks (vmdk) to that new volume.

What is the better way for nimble's dedupe features and performance?

Thank you for your help
Christian

[veremin]

I'd definitely vote for the first option, the second one does not look that tempting due to the reasons mentioned here. Thanks!