I have been investigating using veeam for backups of our Virtual Machines. It can do a direct SAN backup which is pretty cool, but it makes me nervous that you have to give read\write access to the volumes that it talks to (When you are using equalLogic, Veeam only needs read). I would like it if the EqualLogic could have different ACL’s for the different initiators. (You can do this at the volume level but not the initiator as far as I can tell)
So, for example my ESX servers would all have read write to the shared volume. And my veeam server would only have read access to the shared volume.
Of course my feature request for veeam now is to quiesce the VM, sql\exchnage VSS ect… and then trigger the EqualLogic snapshot, and backup from it instead! That would be cool!
Michael Ellerbeck 
Michael,
One more thing I still don’t get is about Veeam, we will run Veeam Backup from a vCenter server (W2K8 R2), our SAN is Equallogic PS6000XV
From Veeam Backup, there are 4 options, the 1st is SAN with failover and the 2nd is SAN.
My urgent question is Do we need to DIRECTLY CONNECT our physical vCenter server to VMFS?
However, EQL STRONGLY SUGGEST US NOT TO, as that VM VMFS on EQL is managed by ESX Host,
you definitely do not want to attach another iSCSI initiator from Windows Host (ie, vCenter server)
or we will risk corrupting our VMFS volume.
So in this case, how can we still do SAN OFFLOAD (ie, not using LAN method), ie, directly retrieve
backup image and send to vCenter server where we run our Veeam B&R?
It’s just quite confusing for using Veeam with EQL.
Jack
Yes, you do, but you must must must turn off auto mount!
WARNING-
MAKE SURE TO RUN diskpart (Or you will overwrite your VM’s! obviously not good!)
So, run
automount disable
automount scrub
exit
Then reboot.
END WARNING-
See this post on using it. https://michaelellerbeck.com/2010/04/01/using-equallogic-with-veeam/