Proxy assignment/filtering

[DaveWatkins]

Hi All

I've been looking to see if DirectSAN will be supported in VMWare 6.5 with VVOL's and the answer appears to be no, worst it appears like it's something that will never be supported and is basically impossible because of the architecture of VVOL's

With that in mind i"m trying to work out how to cleanly backup VVOL's without DirectSAN. To be clear my problem isn't that I have to use HotAdd, my problem is how to make Veeam perform sensible proxy selection when backing up VM's across both types of datastores.

At the moment none of my VM's are using VVOL's because of this. I was hoping 6.5 and 9.5U1 would allow DirectSAN but as thats not the case I'm now trying to work out how to make this work. All my current jobs are restricted to only use my SAN attached proxies. I have some HotAdd proxies for replication and restores but for backups they aren't used.

To be able to backup VVOL based VM's I woudl need to add them back into all my jobs, but in doing that they would also be used for my VM's on VMFS datastores, and I don't want that to happen. The only way I can see to force VMFS VM's to backup using the DirectSAN proxies, and the VVOL VM's to use the HotAdd proxies it to double up on all my jobs.

Is there some other way to do this? How can we force our VMFS based VM's to use the SAN proxies while still allowing VVOL based VM's to use HotAdd without the VMFS VM's also using the extra HotAdd capacity?

Thanks
Dave

[dellock6]

Hi Dave,
why don't you leave all your backups to automatically select proxies so you don't have to reconfigure them everytime, and instead you work with proxy configuration? The first thing that comes to my mind is to change the default processing mode of each proxy, and force each of them to do either direct storage or hotadd. In this way, virtual proxies will never be able to do directsan (unless your storage is ethernet based AND proxies have a route to your storage) and physical proxies on the other side will never be able to use hotadd. In this way, each proxy type will only process the type of storage it can see.

Luca

[DaveWatkins]

Hi Luca

The problem isn't that the proxies use the wrong mode, it's that if I leave the job on automatic the HotAdd proxies are used to do the normal backups for VMFS based VM's thus impacting network and ESX host load. What I'm trying to achieve is to have all VMFS based VM's backed up using DirectSAN and all VVOL based VM's backed up using HotAdd

If I wanted to create another set of hotAdd proxies I could limit the datastores they could see to only the VVOL datastore, theoretically but having jusy looked at that now, it seems the datastore browser doesn't actually display the VVOL datastore in Veeam anyway, so that wouldn't work either.

Thanks
Dave

[dellock6]

ah ok got it, sorry for the confusion.
Uhm, other than setting the list of authorized proxies to be used in a single job I don't see too many options, indeed it may be cumbersome to do, but you can automate it via powershell. Proxy groups would have helped here...

[pricejus]

This feature would be of use to us as well. We use Nutanix hyper-converged nodes for our compute and storage. I have Veeam setup for Direct NFS for transport mode on the proxies. We have one proxy per host configured since Nutanix tries to keep data locality for hosts. However the problem is we have separate clusters configured in VMware and those separate clusters have separate storage. So for each cluster I need to configure the backup jobs to use only the proxies that reside on that cluster. I know I can manually do this by manually selecting each proxy to use but would be nice if I could configure proxy groups that I could select for the jobs. Not sure if there is a better way to accomplish this?

[foggy]

Hi Justin, are you saying that in case of automatic proxy selection proxies from other clusters are selected? Describing your setup in more details would help to make the problem more clear.

[pricejus]

Foggy,

So we have 3 Nutanix clusters each with their own datastore. We have proxies configured on each host (for data locality and performance). So when I configure backup jobs depending on what cluster the VM resides on changes which proxies I can assign. This isn't a huge issue now as we don't have a ton of proxies in each cluster and I can manually select the required proxies in the job settings. It would be nice if I could just assign proxies to proxy groups (so Tier2ProxyGroup contains all 6 proxies) and then just select that group in the job configuration. Let me try auto-proxy selection and see if that works but the issue I had in the past was instead of running DirectNFS access mode the job would use hot add. Under no circumstances do I want the job to use hot add as it causes VM stun issues on the VMs. It is possible I am missing something. Thanks Foggy!

Tier1 (Datastore1)
-Tier1Proxy1
-Tier1Proxy2
-Tier1Proxy3
-Tier1Proxy4

Tier2 (Datastore2)
-Tier2Proxy1
-Tier2Proxy2
-Tier2Proxy3
-Tier2Proxy4
-Tier2Proxy5
-Tier2Proxy6

Tier3 (Datastore3)
-Tier3Proxy1
-Tier3Proxy2
-Tier3Proxy3
-Tier3Proxy4