VMware vSphere 7.0 introduced many great features. One of these features is vSAN 7.0 File Services. But if your organization is thinking of using this feature, what are the options available to you to protect your critical data saved on vSAN 7.0 File Service?
Disclaimer: This blog post is not officially supported by Veeam; all testing and screenshots capturing was performed in CloudOasis labs for capability testing and learning.
Last week, I took the opportunity to upgrade my new lab to vSphere 7.0 to learn more about the new features and enhancements in this version.
To save money on storage and networking equipments, I decided that I would build my new lab, and use vSAN and NSX product.
If you are following VMware news, you are already aware that vSAN 7.0 introduced several enhancements and features; I am keen to show you one of the features that impresses me, vSAN File-Services.
I won’t deep dive into the why and how to the deploy this feature; but I can share with you that the implementation of this feature is very simple. It is a Wizard driven deployment with networking information to be supplied; you end up with “vSAN File Service Nodes” deployed to each of the ESXi hosts participating on your vSAN config:
After the OVF has downloaded and deployed, you are able to create an NFS share v3 or v4.1 that you can use to save files, Container data, etc…
Protecting your vSAN File Services
I’m sure that if you enabled vSAN FS on your environment, you did that because it will hold important data, and you need a way to protect it.
Well, this is exactly why I deployed, configured and tested this feature, to see how easy it is to backup and restore data from a vSAN FS implementation.
To accomplish this, I used the Veeam Backup and Replication v10 NFS feature. Shown below are the steps I took to protect and recover my vSAN FS Shares:
Adding vSAN FS Share to Veeam
From the Veeam console, browse to Inventory -> File Share:
At the File Share, add an NFS Share. Then enter the vSAN Share you exposed:
Next, add the File Proxy. Then fine-tune the backup I/O control. Press Apply to complete the configuration:
Testing
You can see that adding the vSAN FS share to Veeam console is a very straightforward and simple task. But, can you back up the files in it?
Well, let’s try this by creating a File share Backup Job and test:
The screenshot shown above indicates that the backup was completed successfully. It was also fast enough for my lab standards.
My next test was to remove files and then run a file restoration:
You can see below the results of a single file restoration:
The screenshot below illustrates the second test of a complete Share Restoration:
Conclusion
I think the results and the screenshots speak for themselves. I have been able to use Veeam NFS to protect my newly provisioned and configured vSAN FS without any challenges. That is made possible by both Veeam and VMWare supporting NFS 3.0 and 4.1. Backup and Recovery of my Lab vSAN was seamless, and fast, leaving no doubt about the success of our end results.
