So in my quest of looking for backup solutions I have noticed a lot of new talk about "LAN free backups" where backups would travel on your storage network (FC / iSCSI) and I was looking to see how one would do that? I may be way behind the times on this but I was told during the 3.x days that you should keep your VMFS volumes completely isolated from any non-ESX server. If I'm reading the documentation correctly you would need read access to your VMFS volumes on the server conducting the backups, which would be a Windows server.
I can see the obvious benefit by moving from Ethernet to FC for performance but what about the risk of corrupting the VMFS volumes? Also is this more acceptable with higher-end SANs vs entry level SANs that only have access controls by HBA cards?
Hi,
My environment is ISCSI and I use veeam to backup my VMs.
I'm currently looking at Veeam, I haven't had much experiance with iSCSI but we're a FC shop so I wasn't sure how the interaction / connection rules would come into place here as all the access roles come from FC HBA adapters.
Hi,
The FC SAN Storage the same as the iSCSI the only difference is the way how they are connected. In your FC SAN Storage, create one LUN and present it to the Veeam VM either via RDM/Proxing ESX or direct Access using the Windows 2008 iSCSI initiator. This will allow you to access the LUN directly.
Focus only on one ESX, create a vSwitch with Service Console without vmnic attached to it, then add the ESX to the Veeam Machine using the newly created Service Console.
Create a Backup Job targetting VMs on the ESX that added to the Veeam VM, make sure when you create the job is Direct SAN Access. This option, will allow the backup to go within the ESX Server itself, without interfering the LAN.
Hope it helps.
Thanks,
S.Hussain
I ended up just using virtual appliance mode which isn't exactly the same but it works better than network and without the worry of attaching multiple vmfs luns to my windows backup server. Thanks for the info.
Do what I have described above and you will impressed with the backup speed you gonna see. I'm reaching around 100, 300 and 500 MB/s and with the Incremental backup it reach more than 1GB/s