Questions about Storage Integration Backups with Veeam

[HJAdams123]

Hello and Good Day Veeam Community...

I am testing the Storage Integration feature in Veeam, using a trial proof of concept environment. My storage platform is Pure Storage. It is connected to my environment via Fibre Channel. I configured everything according to the documentation. And it looks like everything is working fine. I can see Veeam creating snapshots on the Pure array, and the job details says its processing the backup from the Pure Storage snapshot. But I was also surprised and confused when I noticed that virtual machine snapshots were also still being taken? I thought one of the big reason to use Storage Integration along side Veeam is to eliminate the need to take virtual machine snapshots? Why is\does Veeam still need to make the virtual machine snapshots?

And one more question... I noticed a new type of vcenter task occurring against the virtual machine being backed up when using Storage Integration. The task is called "Release Disk Lease" and it occurs between the snapshot create and the snapshot delete in vcenter. I have never seen this task in my production environments where I use Veeam and virtual proxies that backup using the [hot add] method.

Thanks for any guidance here...

-Harold

[foggy]

Hi Harold, VMware snapshot is still created but is preserved for a short period of time and deleted right after the storage snapshot is created.

Regarding the "Release Disk Lease" task, this is what VMware logs when Veeam B&R requests VM disk mappings.

[HJAdams123]

Thanks Foggy....

And it is using the VM disk mappings in order to know what to retrieve from the storage snapshot I take it?

[Andreas Neufert]

Correct.