VNX Storage integration

[Jamie]

Just sharing something I found out after a fair bit of testing today - may help someone.

Nutshell:
Once correctly fibred and zoned the Veeam Proxy server does not need to have actual LUNS presented to work, But it does need to belong to a VNX Storage Group to access the generated storage snap shots via a snapshot mount point.

Details;
My Setup; VNX5300 and VNX5600 EMC SANs, I am configuring backups using SAN Snapshots with a decent spec physical windows 2012R2 box as proxy.

After reading the "Best Practices for EMC VNX/VNXe and Data Domain with Veeam Availability Suite" white paper, I think most users will just add the Veeam Proxy into the same Storage group as their VMWare esxi hosts, as per the instructions on page 6;
For all storage protocols, the basic rule is to assign connectivity to the Veeam proxy the same way that you would assign a VMware ESXi host to the storage resource.

In the case of an EMC VNX SAN this usually means add the esxi host to a storage group and connect LUNs to the group. Or in other words expose VMware LUNS to a Windows server OS...hmm

I think the white paper is pretty vague and could be explained a lot better (sorry Rick and Neal), and this is a bit kinda misleading and kinda bad, as when stuff is configured as above it is possible to online and initialize the disks from the OS of the physical Veeam Proxy and whack the data on LUNs- this is especially a threat with VNX SANs as they lack the (supported) option to present a LUN as read only.
So best to avoid if at all possible.

Adding the Veeam proxy to your esxi/vmware storage group does not need to be done and I would suggest an alternate method for integration with VNX arrays- Simply create a new Storage Group and throw the Veeam Proxy in that, no need to add any data LUNS.
Note: If the Proxy is not any storage groups the jobs fail, presumably because the SAN has no method to allow the proxy access to the mount point.

When a job runs you can see the snapshot come into the "Snapshot Mount Points" tab in the new Storage Group details (in Unisphere) and on the Veeam proxy under disk management - you can see the Snaphot LUN number in windows), not the actual LUN number.

That is all.

Cheers,
Jamie

[foggy]

Hi Jamie, thanks for sharing, I'll pass your feedback to Rick and Neal.

[benpaxton]

Jamie,

Sorry for replying to an old post, but it kind of addresses the concern I had with Storage Snapshots. I have a Proxy with storage assigned from my VNX, and it is in a different storage group than the ESXi hosts. I see you are saying that I don't need to give that host direct access to the Storage Group with the VMware Datastores. Would this remove the risk of someone who may be in the server working on another issue that may be unfamiliar with Veeam mounting the datastores in Windows and destroying the production data?

Also, more general question I just came up with (I've been looking through the forums here to clear up some questions before opening a case to ask the questions), I have read on the forum somewhere that the storage needs to be in Storage Pools. I have mine configured in RAID Groups. Do I need to move my LUNs to pools before moving to storage snapshot backups? I must have missed that in the manual. If you don't know off the top of your head, I can use the google machine to find out.

Thanks!

[foggy]

I have a Proxy with storage assigned from my VNX, and it is in a different storage group than the ESXi hosts. I see you are saying that I don't need to give that host direct access to the Storage Group with the VMware Datastores. Would this remove the risk of someone who may be in the server working on another issue that may be unfamiliar with Veeam mounting the datastores in Windows and destroying the production data?

Yes, I believe this is what Jamie is talking about.

Also, more general question I just came up with (I've been looking through the forums here to clear up some questions before opening a case to ask the questions), I have read on the forum somewhere that the storage needs to be in Storage Pools. I have mine configured in RAID Groups. Do I need to move my LUNs to pools before moving to storage snapshot backups? I must have missed that in the manual. If you don't know off the top of your head, I can use the google machine to find out.

Correct, Veeam B&R supports LUNs that reside on Storage Pools only.

[benpaxton]

Great! Thanks. I'll migrate to Storage Pools and revisit this issue. I think this is the way I want to go.

[DaveWatkins]

Just to complete this.

You can restrict the proxy to read only of your VMWare LUN's. It takes using the naviseccli command line utility but it is possible.

The command I've got recorded is as follows

Code: Select all

naviseccli -h <IP> -user <username> -password <password> -scope 0 storagegroup -addhlu -o -gname <SG Name> -hlu 10 -alu 10 -readonly

I haven't run this is a while since I setup my EMC a long time ago and we're not actually doing snapshot integration just Direct SAN, but it's worked without issue for many months now

[bruacho]

Jamie,

on your VNX setup was there anything different you had to do to get veeam to see the LUNs? I am connecting a Veeam host to our cisco 5548s that connect to the VNX systems we have. I can see the servers on the switch but when I add them to the VNX I get an inactive in the connection status.