vSphere Storage API function for Veeam?

[bhwong]

We intend to upgrade our vSphere 4.1 to 5.5 and notice that most of the enterprise features in 4.1 will be available in standard 5.5, such as storage vMotion etc. Because the price difference between standard and enterprise is so huge, we intend to go with standard for cost saving. However, we notice that Storage API is not available in standard edition.

Does Veeam use Storage API for improving features and/or performance? What will I be missing out without Storage API in relation with Veeam deployment?

[dellock6]

As far as I know, Veeam does not leverages any vStorage APIs (as VAAI accelerated libraries). There is no correlation between VAAI and VADP to my knowledge.

For your upgrade project, I would take into account two issues:
- have a look if VAAI makes sense for your production storage, and if you can/want to benefit from them, regardless your
- right now vSphere 5.5 is NOT supported by Veeam, and as from latest Veeam weekly digest, timeline is "before the end of 2013". Think about this twice before upgrade your production environment, and then not being supported for your data protection solution.

Luca.

[bhwong]

I thought so too. The reason why I'm asking this is because I received the Veeam Community Forums Digest and GOSTEV said this:

vSphere 5.5 has also became generally available last week. We have it deployed in our labs, and are currently testing the prototype code built for vSphere 5.5 RC. If all goes as planned, we will release support for both new hypervisors before the year ends (more precise timelines in the next couple of weeks). In the meantime, you can start preparing your backup infrastructure for vSphere 5.5 by upgrading backup proxy servers OS to 64-bit. This is required because starting vSphere 5.5, VMware will ship 64-bit version of vStorage API for Data Protection (VDDK) modules only. Basically, we will continue to support all the same Windows OS versions, but they MUST be 64-bit now, whereas previously it did not matter. If for any reason you are not planning to upgrade to vSphere 5.5 any time soon, then no action is required on your part (you can continue using 32-bit OS for your backup proxies).

[dellock6]

Ah ok, got it too. No, that is another thing, the VDDK is the "disk driver" that enables Veeam (and all other backup solutions based on VADP libraries) to read data from VMFS datastores.
This is anyway an important design consideration: we have some months ("by the end of the year") to properly design the backup infrastructure, and upgrade if needed all the Veeam proxies to be 64 bit systems.

Luca.

[bhwong]

So what does this means? Without vStorage API from vSphere Enterprise edition, Veeam won't be able to read data from the VMFS datastores???

[chrisdearden]

the VDDK and VADP ( VMware APi for Data Protection ) API are available in any licenced version of vsphere (other than the free version ) as far as I'm aware. VADP is what drives Veeam Backup.

[dellock6]

Boon, I think there is some confusion by the fact they are both called vStorage API. But the complete names are different:
- vStorage API for Data Protection (in short, VADP) are the libraries used by Veeam for vSphere operations, and are totally licensed in any paid version of vSphere
- vStorage API for Array Integration (in short, VAAI) are the accelerated libraries to offload some storage operations, and are available only in some vSphere editions, and with storage arrays with official support for it

Veeam uses VADP, not VAAI.

Luca.