Will SAN mode ever be supported for replication?

[HendersonD]

With Veeam the initial replication job uses SAN mode. After that, every replication job uses NBD or network mode
I just saw that under ESXi 6.5, NBD modes uses encryption which increases the replication time by 20 to 30%
We plan on jumping to ESXi 6.5 this summer and I would rather not have my replication jobs take a lot longer
Will Veeam ever support SAN mode for all replication jobs just like they do for backup jobs?

[foggy]

Are you referring to direct SAN on source or target side? On source, direct SAN is used during each replication cycle, just like for backup jobs:

Veeam Backup & Replication uses the Direct SAN access transport mode to read and write VM data only during the first session of the replication job. During subsequent replication job sessions, Veeam Backup & Replication will use the Virtual Appliance or Network transport mode on the target side. The source side proxy will keep reading VM data from the source datastore in the Direct SAN access transport mode.

[HendersonD]

Sorry, should have been clearer. Our replication does use SAN mode on the source side, I am speaking about also using SAN mode on the target side. Our backup jobs use SAN mode on source and backup side

[foggy]

This comes down to VDDK limitation, direct SAN is only supported for thick-provisioned disks, while incremental data goes into a snapshot file, which is always thin-provisioned.

[HendersonD]

How does this differ from Veeam backup, doesn't that use differential data?

[foggy]

Backup jobs write data to the backup repository, not VMware datastore, and obviously don't use VMware VADP for that.

[HendersonD]

Thanks for the explanation. I am hoping Veeam or VMWare can fix the issue of slow backups/replication in NBD mode for ESXi 6.5. It would be nice if encryption could be turned off so as not to slow down the job

[foggy]

You can always have a proxy VM on target for faster population of data via hotadd, performance will be comparable to direct SAN.