Questions about ports involved

[codot]

Hello people,

I've read the documentation through and through... I still have a couple of questions about the ports involved. Could someone help me ?

1 - Is there a communication between the Backup Server and the ESXi servers when those are managed by a vCenter, the backup job target VMs through the vCenter Inventory and the backup method employed is virtual appliance or Direct SAN access through a backup proxy ? My guess would be that the only communication between a backup proxy and the virtual infrastructure in this case would be through the vCenter to locate the VMs to backup.

2 - What port does the Backup Server use to communicate jobs parameters to backup proxys and retrieve informations about the job progress ? Is it the one you name "Veeam Transport Services" (TCP 6162) ?

3 - What is the use of the vPower NFS Service port (TCP 6161) between the Veeam Backup Server and a Windows Server (backup repository I guess) ? Is it used to control the NFS Service to publicate NFS datastores to the virtual infrastructure ?

4 - Same, what is the use of the standard NFS ports between the Veeam Backup Server and a Windows Server ? I thought NFS communication was only employed between a backup repository and ESXi servers...

5 - Also, the way data are transmitted between the backup proxy and the backup repository seems unclear to me. According to the documentation, the data connexion is initiated by the backup repository to the backup proxy. Shouldn't it be the opposite ? Isn't the backup proxy the client in this architecture ?

Thank you !

Clement.

[tsightler]

Here's my stab at it:

1. The proxy must also communicate with the ESXi hosts to be able to grab VM configuration files, etc. Only the actual VMDK data itself can be accessed via Hotadd/Direct SAN.

2. Yes, TCP port 6162 is used as a control channel for the Veeam Transport Service

3. Yes, TCP port 6161 is used as a control channel for the vPower NFS Service

4 - Not 100% sure what you mean but the vPower NFS service actually runs on a proxy, not a repository (it can of course run on a repository that is also a proxy). That means there is traffic between the proxy and repository, as well as NFS traffic between the proxy and ESXi console.

5 - In the current implementation the documentation is correct, the Veeam server communicates with both the proxy and the repository, and then the repository establishes the connection back to the proxy. For replication, the target proxy makes the connection back to the source proxy.

[codot]

Thanks a lot Tom.

About the point n°4 I was refering to the page 58 of the documentation where it is stated that the Veeam Backup Server initiate connexions to "Windows Server" on "Standard NFS Ports" (111, 2049, 1058).

I was wondering what would the Backup Server transfer over NFS to the proxy server...