Physical Veeam server and hotadd/Direct SAN

[VMPAT]

I have a 2008 R2 physical server that has a 10 TB NTFS local storage that is set up using iSCSI to a IBM DS3000 SAN. This server has Veeam B&R version 6.5 installed, I have a proxy backup server on a VMware server in the environment.

The Datastore's are on cluster of P4300 SANs when I run a backup job I get the error Direct SAN connection is not available failing over to network mode, when I checked the automount on the physical backup server it was set to enabled, I read that this was set to disabled as part if the B&R installation? Also in checking the proxy server that was installed via the B&R server that too has automount enabled?

Now for the questions:

If I added the IP's to the iSCSI initiator on the physical server for the datastores on the P4300 to the physical backups server, with automount disabled would this enable Direct SAN access mode to run?

The original consultant who did the setup wanted to use the physical backup server for disk-disk-tape, as it has a tape library connected to it, would the iSCSi storage have been better added as a vhd, then added to the VMware cluster as another Datastore to use the Hotadd functionality rather than local and NTFS as a shared repository.

They are not utilising the snapshot functionality build into Veeam as although allows for fast restores etc, it does not meet the backup requirements.

If I disable automount on the physical server add the three virtual IP's of the P4300 SAN's to the Veeam B&R server does this enable Direct SAN.

[foggy]

In Windows 2008 R2, there is no need to disable "automount", as there is a more proper way to keep your SAN LUNs uninitialized - you need to set the SAN POLICY to OfflineAll instead. Сheck that the SAN policy is set to Offline Shared using diskpart and the "SAN" command.

For the tips on how to configure Direct SAN access mode. please refer to the sticky FAQ topic.

Also I'm a bit confused by this phrase, could you please clarify what do you mean?

They are not utilising the snapshot functionality build into Veeam as although allows for fast restores etc, it does not meet the backup requirements.

Veeam B&R is an image-based solution that always relies on snapshots to perform backups. Are you probably referring to VM replication?

[VMPAT]

Hi foggy thanks for the reply,

Also I'm a bit confused by this phrase, could you please clarify what do you mean?

What I meant was that they are not taking HP SAN snapshots using that functionality of the Lefthands. But only using Veeam backup jobs, to write to the IBM SAN repository.

The more and more I use Veeam the more and more I am finding write up's on the product that reveal things like, "You must disable CBT on your backup proxy (very important)." I know there is a lot of literature and that most "including myself" never read the manuals back to back, but where do we find configuration requirements. In this instance if you disable CBT on your Proxy and it is a production system will this not take longer to back up the systems that are being used as proxy's as it will not be able to use CBT?

Can I confirm if I need to add a second iSCSI controller to my proxy server to allow for HotAdd, I thought that this was all taken care of buy the Veeam backup server as part of running the Job, I know I have access to all the datastores as on that particular host as I have 4 VM's that have VMDK's on each of the three datastores in the cluster.

Thanks again for your assistance,

[foggy]

In this instance if you disable CBT on your Proxy and it is a production system will this not take longer to back up the systems that are being used as proxy's as it will not be able to use CBT?

Yes, it will take longer as Veeam B&R will have to read the whole VM disks to define the changed blocks. However, this applies to hotadd proxies only (those of them that are used to backup other VMs via hotadd). You can read more on that here.

Can I confirm if I need to add a second iSCSI controller to my proxy server to allow for HotAdd, I thought that this was all taken care of buy the Veeam backup server as part of running the Job, I know I have access to all the datastores as on that particular host as I have 4 VM's that have VMDK's on each of the three datastores in the cluster.

You do not have to add an additional SCSI controller to the proxy VM to allow hotadd, but you might want to do so. This is just a typical recommendation that allows to increase performance coming from the fact that all disks of the backed up VMs are attached (hot added) to the proxy server during backup if hotadd mode is used (the more SCSI controllers the proxy VM has, the more I/O performance is). Some details can be found here.