Who uses Pure Storage with VMware & Veeam?

[Mccarlin]

Hello,

I'd like to know who is using Veeam BDR in a VMware environment with Pure Storage? We are a potential customer of Pure Storage as we are looking to switch out our existing SANs and have some concerns with continuing our backup models.

Today we are using Storage snapshot backups with Veeam and Dell Compellent. Our servers are way too large to use an agent based backup OR a VMware snapshot backup. This has worked well for us.

With Pure Storage, in order to use the most functionality of their system its best if we moved to Vvols from the traditional VMFS files system. This allows all the VMware snapshotting to be offloaded to the Pure hardware and processed there, much faster. The main issue is we are not able to continue using Storage snapshot backups with Veeam and Pure using a VVol, this is a VMware limitation currently.

Therefore we would be stuck either doing an agent based backup OR a traditional VMware snapshot backup. We do not know how performance impacting this will be with Pure, we know with our old SANS it would take our production down.

Has anyone have experience with this? Using Vvols with Pure storage and how are you performing backups? The big question is if doing a standard VMware snapshot backup, will the snapshot consolidation be MUCH faster with pure having Pure hardware manage the snaps? There is no way for us to test this without purchasing Pure for millions and learning later we cannot get backups from Veeam.

[chris.childerhose]

Never used VVOLs on Pure but have tested out the Pure plugin for Veeam for doing SAN snapshots which works very well. Need to have the right connectivity into the SAN fabric and setup but it works very well.

https://www.veeam.com/kb4129

[DonZoomik]

Disclaimer, I'm a Pure partner but we also use it internally, also with VVOLs. But VVOL stuff is not specific to Pure...
VVOL does not mean VMware snapshots. With VVOL, all snapshot functionality is offloaded to array.
There is no VMFS or VMDKs to snapshot (yes config is VMFS but that's besides the point). Each VM disk is effectively a separate LUN on array, practically like RDMs. When you ask VMware to perform a snapshot, it just passes the command to array to snap all the LUNs associated with VM. When you want the snapshot removed, VMware tells the array to remove them.
In effect, all snapshots with VVOL are storage snapshots.
The difference is that VVOL snaps cannot be mounted to DirectSAN proxy. You must use HotAdd or NBD to pull them off the array through VMware. But this shouldn't really matter as you'll still fully skip VMFS/VMDK snapshots.

Besides the limitation of no DirectSAN support, it's even better than Storage Snapshots. It's much faster to operate as you can skip the VMware snap create (in batch) - Storage snap create - VMware snap remove dance.

With most (all?) storage arrays, snap removal is instant. Including Pure.

Pure has pretty good Try Before You Buy program. They'll ship you the array for testing. If you like it, you can buy it. If you don't, you can return it. We did this before becoming a partner to see if the hype holds up.

[micoolpaul]

In case you haven’t seen, VMware do a VROOM! Blog series based on performance.

They did a comparison last year for VMDK/VSAN/VVOL. Check it out: https://blogs.vmware.com/performance/20 ... shots.html

VVOL led the performance metrics with & without snapshots, they also implemented multiple snapshots to see how performance degraded with the addition of each extra snapshot.

The caveat to this is that VVOL is offloading operations to your SAN so your mileage may vary. But Pure are correct here, your best experience, with minimal VM stun times and best performance during backup operations will be with VVOL generally.

As DonZoomik mentioned, snapshots are offloaded to the SAN so that really is in essence a storage snapshot, though without the additional hoops Veeam has to go through to interact with the SAN. Provided you have a suitable proxy to maximise backup performance from a VVOL it sounds to be your best option.

[Klarmann]

Hi,

we use Veeam11a with our PureStorage active-active cluster. Works very with Backup from Storage Snapshots. We do not use VVOL - The Pure is just a block storage which presents the LUNs to VMware.
We use Pure now for almost four years. I can recommend the system

[HostedBDR]

I would recommend Pure, if you can afford it. It's solid. As with what everyone has mentioned the VVOL ability with Pure (and other vendors that support VVOL) it is strongly recommended.

[rennerstefan]

Today we are using Storage snapshot backups with Veeam and Dell Compellent.

Just to avoid any confusion as it is not 100% clear in the thread.
There is no Storage Integration support from Veeam with Pure and vVols.
That said you can't use the same as what you use today but, as mentioned already in the thread, you will need to use NBD or HotAdd mode.

So the decision really also depends on the overall backup strategy and functions you need/want to use.
If you want to make sure VMware does not have much load during backup then traditional LUN based with Veeam Backup from Storage Snapshot maybe the right choice, if you want to leverage vVol funcitons then go for it.

Good thing there is always a way to back it up with Veeam.