What does Veeam do to guest-attached iSCSI disks?

[gpearson]

I have a VMware VM that has a vmdk for its system disk, and a secondary iSCSI disk mounted directly from our SAN using the Windows initiator. For this VM I set Veeam to backup the system disk only, and it's working perfectly, but Veeam is still touching the iSCSI disk for some reason.

This server is running some surveillance software for our network-based cameras, and that secondary iSCSI disk is where the recordings are stored. The software can detect if anything is saved in the area designated for recordings, and it has been firing off that alarm every night during our backup window since I added it to Veeam.

Will Veeam write some kind of files to all disks during guest processing or something? Is there anything I could do to stop it from touching that disk period beyond what I did by selecting system disk backup only?

[antipolis]

try disabling application aware processing (and/or quiesce) for this particular VM maybe ?

[foggy]

Actually, disks connected via in-guest ISCSI initiator cannot be snapshotted and thus automatically skipped by Veeam B&R from processing, so shouldn't be touched even if you do not specify exclusions for them. Do you see any particular disk activity in this area related to backup process (new or changed files or something)?

[gpearson]

There are never any files leftover the next day, so whatever it is doing is being removed before the backup ends. The alarm is very specific that data is being created on that drive area it has designated for recordings:



I checked the backup logs, and that alarm triggering time is always ~2 minutes after Veeam's 'VM processing started at xx' message appears. It also looks to be failing over to network mode because Direct SAN is not available for hard disk 1 (works for all other servers), maybe that is related?

[foggy]

Might be VSS activity during file system quiescence. You can try to disable both application-aware image processing and VMware quiescence to check (like suggested above), this shouldn't show up in case of crash-consistent backup.

[antipolis]

[bhagen]

I've upgraded to VBR9.5, latest update.

We have 2 legacy Windows 2008R2 VMs that have iscsi attached storage from within Windows.

Can the latest ver of VBR "see" that iscsi attached storage and back it up? I think the answer is still "no", as I can't see those drives when I create a backup job for those VMs, but thought I'd check.

I currently have Veeam endpoint on those vm's that's happily backing up those drives, but we'll be moving those VMs to a new vmware stack in a few months, and it would be nice to do one restore job rather than two for each of those vms.

Thanks!

[DGrinev]

Hi,

It's not possible to backup such volumes with the VBR, however, you are already using the recommended approach with the Endpoint.
Please review this topic for additional information. Thanks!