veeam restore V appliance mode

[stormlight]

Hello, reading the doc and just wanted to clear some things up.

Under transport mode in the user guide it states

"For writing data to the target destination, Veeam Backup & Replication normally uses the Network mode. In some cases, such as VM replication or full VM recovery,Veeam Backup & Replication also supports the Virtual Appliance mode. Note that you cannot choose what transport mode will be used for writing data – Veeam Backup & Replication selects it"

When restoring full VMs what network design to you need to get VA mode?

For example I have a veeam VM with a cifs Data domain repository. I want to restore from the DataDomain to a ISCSI or NFS Nas.

Is it true that this restore full vm won't run in VA mode since my ESX host does not have an iscsi connection to the data domain box? With out this iscsi connection it can not hot add the backup disk. What if I mounted the data domain box to the ESX host as a NFS store? (Side note: inside the veeam vm it has access to each network. The DataDomain cifs backup repository, the NFS/ISCI nas restore target, and the ESX service console network) In addition the NAS itself is presented to ESX as a NFS and can be iscsi connection.)


Thanks.

[tsightler]

A virtual proxy on the same cluster as the VM you are attempting to restore is generally all that is required. Basically, if the proxy VM can access the same ESX datastore of the VM you are restoring, then it will use hotadd, simple as that. The place where the backups themselves are stored is not important as that's not the device that is being hotadded.

[stormlight]

so the veeam proxy vm and the esx host need to access the datastore where the restore being written to.

It doesn't matter if the vm veeam proxy gets to it by cifs and the esx host gets to it by NFS?

protocols do not matter in any way? Would it help performance if veeam proxy and esx both contacted the restore location via iscsi?

[tsightler]

The proxy would not access the restore location via CIFS since it would access through the ESX host. Just to be sure we're talking the same language, you do understand that hotadd is only used for full VM or VMDK level restores, right? Guest file level restores always go through the network.

[Vitaliy S.]

Btw, here you go system requirements for Virtual Appliance (Hot Add) mode. My 2 cents.

[stormlight]

Thank you, Im not trying to be stupid but, In my case (for a full vm restore)

Veeam VM fires off full restore. Veeam VM hot adds the Veeam backup file from the data domain through the ESX host through the storage stack back to the veeam VM. (is this storage stack using the vmkernel?)

Then Veeam VM pushes the data to the NAS via the storage stack through ESX. (again through the vmkernal thats on the switch for the NAS?)

And in these two data paths the connection from ESX to the NAS and ESX to the datadomin or any repository your saying the ISCSI verse NFS doesn't help or matter with performance?

[tsightler]

I think you might be making this more complicated that it really is. This has nothing to do with reading the backup file from the DataDomain, that doesn't change no matter what you do as this data is read via CIFS. You can remove that from the equation.

Whether a restore uses Network or Hotadd mode only affects how the data is written to the restored VM. That's all. With Network mode, the data is written via the ESX management stack, with Hotadd mode the disks for the restored VMs are temporarily attached to the VM and the proxy VM writes the data directly to them

[rbrambley]

I had this same discussion recently, and I still have my iPad drawing I used to explain.
Sometimes a whiteboard is worth 1,000 thread replies ...

Veeam VAppl CIFS Target.jpg (95.18 KiB) Viewed 3343 times