Veeam reads the data from disks attached to the virtual appliance.The VMDKS are hot-added to the virtual appliance.Veeam notifies vSphere to take a snapshot.The proxy requests from the ESXi host the location of the VM on the datastore.This is due to VMware vSAN using modes that are not compatible with SAN transport and is disabled if the virtual disk library detects the presence of vSAN. Important to note with VMware vSAN, Direct SAN Transport is not supported. Basically, we provision VMs on the datastore that will act as proxies to provide Hot-add functionality for more efficient transfers.Īs noted, if it doesn’t make sense to utilize Direct SAN Access mode, then Virtual Appliance Mode is the preferred way to setup your proxies. The Virtual appliance mode reduces the administrative overhead of configuring LUN connections for direct SAN access and allows utilizing the VMware Hot-Add process. Virtual Appliance mode is a configuration Veeam proxies that can be recommended in highly dynamic environments where maintaining Direct SAN Transport is difficult to do. Let’s take a look at configuring Veeam Virtual Appliance Mode for VMware vSAN as this is the recommended configuration for backing up virtual machines on vSAN using Veeam. With Veeam Virtual Appliance Mode we can backup VMware vSAN virtual machines much more efficiently. Veeam has a backup proxy configuration called Virtual Appliance Mode. There are some considerations to be made when thinking about backups of vSAN using data protection solutions such as Veeam to backup vSAN. When backing up VMware vSAN, data protection solutions can still take advantage of VMware vSphere Storage APIs – Data Protection as they do backing up virtual machines from any type of VMware storage as it is storage agnostic.

Vmware veeam backup best practices