Virtual Appliance and iSCSI target

[bitbite]

Hello,

I have a single ESXi 5.0 U1 host with two VM's. I'd like to back up the VM's onto an iSCSI volume hosted by a Synology NAS.

Veeam B&R 6.5.0.109_x64 is installed on one of those VM's (Windows Server 2008 x64).

What I'm trying to achieve:
Veeam backup traffic to flow over a dedicated physical NIC on the ESXi host. All traffic from VM's to flow over other physical NIC's.

What I've done to try and achieve this:
-Created a second Standard vSwitch (vSwitch1) and placed it on a separate subnet, created "Veeam Backup" network (192.168.11.0/24)
-Enabled Virtual Machine, Management and VMKernel traffic on vSwitch1
-Configured secondary NIC ("LAN2") on NAS with an IP address in the "Veeam Backup" network subnet
-Connected a cable between the physical NIC associated with vSwitch1 and a NIC on the NAS
-Added a second virtual NIC to the 2008 VM and associated with the "Veeam Backup" network
-Mounted the iSCSI volume on the Windows Server 2008 VM as N:\. Forced iSCSI Initiator to connect to the "LAN2" IP address of the NAS to ensure traffic flows over the correct virtual NIC (iSCSI Initiator\Targets\Log on\Advanced\Target Portal)
-Configured backup repository to back up to N:\

Issue
When running a Veeam backup job and looking at Task Manager on the 2008 VM, the virtual NIC associated with the LAN network (192.168.0.0/24) is fully utilized (50-99%) and the Veeam Backup virtual NIC is idling. As a test, I copied a file from the 2008 VM to the N:\ drive - the Veeam Backup virtual NIC is utilized. So it seems that Windows chooses the correct path when doing a simply file copy, but Veeam does not.

Can anyone please advise what I am doing wrong here?

Thanks in advance!

[Andreas Neufert]

I think it is a DNS Problem.

Veeam resolves the ESXi host Name and uses this IP address for the backup.
You can use Windows hosts file to Point to the second IP address of your ESXi host.

You Need also take care that the Synology DNS Name is the same way resolved if you connect by DNS.

Do not forget to reboot Veeam Server after changes.

CU Andy

[bitbite]

Thank you, and sorry for the late reply.

I am using only IP addresses with the iSCSI connection. The host will probably resolve to a LAN IP (haven't checked), but why would Veeam care? I'm telling it to back up to a local volume, why would it bother with IP address/host names or try to resolve anything?

[Andreas Neufert]

If you look at the Jobs Statistik do they use DirectSAN/Hotadd or LAN(NBD) for read out the data?

[bitbite]

It doesn't seem to specify what you're after:

[Andreas Neufert]

In the backup statistics screen (the upper one) klick on a single vm on the right side. You will see then the mode for each screen on the right side.

[bitbite]

OK found it

NBD

[Andreas Neufert]

NBD is Network mode. Our Server read from the VMkernel Interfaces.
So your datastream on the Network Interfaces came from this read.

Have a look at the documentation regarding Hotadd (Virtual Appliance Mode). With this Modus you can read out data without Network.