Veeam's capability to Integrate with Pure Flasharray for Hardware Snapshot based VMWare backups

[solvingforward]

Gents, I've been researching Veeam's capability to Integrate with Pure Flasharray for Hardware Snapshot based VMWare backups (to qualify it as an alternative to our existing backup Solution).

Question - Does Veeam, while leveraging Pure Flasharray Snapshot have the capability to distribute VMWare virtual machines to all participating proxies in it's 'Advanced' configuration documented at https://www.purestorage.com/content/dam ... -guide.pdf

If so, any pointers to it's configuration or documentation would be appreciated.

[Andreas Neufert]

Hello Mohit,

thanks for the request. Can you please describe a little bit deeper what you want to do exactly. "have the capability to distribute VMWare virtual machines to all participating proxies in it's 'Advanced' configuration"

Maybe in general, Veeam Proxies that read the data from the VMware/Storage environment (as well for restore) are always load balanced. Even when we backup a single VM, the VM disks are load balanced accross the Proxy infrastructure.
On the other side there are several way to influence the Proxy selection if you want to limit this to specific ones.

[solvingforward]

Basically, looking for Veeam's equivalent for Commvault's Multinode Backup Copy for the VMware Agent using Pure Flasharray Snapshot- https://documentation.commvault.com/com ... =37178.htm .In this configuration Pure FA Snapshot is presented to a hostgroup containing multiple proxies, all proxies collectively participating to load balance the Virtual Machine backup workload

[foggy]

Hi Mohit, as Andreas has mentioned, Veeam B&R has built-in parallel processing. If there are several proxies available, VM disks located on different volumes will be processed in parallel by different proxies. VM disks located on the same volume will take the slots on a single proxy, provided there are enough of them available and will be assigned to other proxies otherwise.

[Andreas Neufert]

The short answer is: Yes

The Veeam technology is different - we do not mount the LUN snapshot to a VMware host temporarily, and then use a Proxy there. Our process is much more streamlined: we mount LUN snapshots directly to our Proxies (with load balancing is based on Proxy load), which obviously works much faster and more reliable comparing to looping through VMware "mount hosts". In addition, this approach allows us to do incremental backups based on VMware CBT (Change Block Tracking), which competitors cannot offer because with their approach, processed VMs have to be temporarily registered on those VMware hosts anew.

This is the way Veeam worked since the support for the first vendor for storage snapshot processing (many years). And there's nothing new or different for us here in terms of proxy load balancing either: our engine does this regardless of whether the storage snapshot integration is used or not.

[solvingforward]

Sounds perfect, thank you Andreas and Alexander, this confirmation is much appreciated.