Being on vsphere with vm’s at hardware level 7 is the best setup.
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-
Install Veeam. Install Hit kit. Take your iSCSI initiator address and give it access to the volume on the SAN where your VM resides.
Go back to veeam server. Double Click iSCSI Initiator, add the group address for your EqualLogic SAN. Click Targets tab, Logon to the volume (set as persistent)
Open up computer manager. Should see Healthy (Unknown Partition)
Now you are ready for a SAN backup!
Fire up Veeam
Add your vcenter server
Add each esx host (authenticate by clicking on each esx host)
(Service console mode has best performance)
When creating jobs,
Enable safe snapshot removal.
(Enable Veeam VSS integration, veeam will install an agent)
Veeam does not advise running parallel jobs that hit the same LUN, because it causes a number of problems with VMFS like SCSI reservation timeouts.
Michael Ellerbeck 
Cool. Re-posted it here for the Facebook EqualLogic group: http://www.facebook.com/#!/group.php?gid=2367606091
Michael – Thanks for the post! quite useful, will be trying this in about 10 minutes so I’m glad I found this, thanks for the info.
What other tips are there for Veeam? Struggling to find the best way to backup 200+ guests on about 14 3.5 hosts…could use some insight as to what’s been seen in practice. Thanks again!
What kind of performance are you seeing? I was able to get BackupExec 2010R2 to transfer at 816MB/min. using ‘hot add’, but ‘SAN mode’ isn’t working no matter what I try.
Will be testing veeam tomorrow.
Thanks
Michael,
I just found this page after post a comment to another blog article of yours.
I see how it works, basically I need to create a NEW volume on EQL and attach it on my vCenter (where I installed Veeam B&R) as My Backup Device for all the VMs. (as shown in the above picture, ie, 500GB), then Veeamagent.exe will contact via vCenter and backup VMs (on EQL) directly to this 500GB volume? Is it how this works?
But then
1. If this is the Veeam SAN backup method, then all data still have to travel between my vCenter and EQL, I thought somehow it will backup direclty within EQL itself.
2. What if I want to backup the data to vCenter server’s local storage (say 2TB harddisk), then how can I still use SAN method in Veeam? (or in other words, not using LAN, but direct SAN backup method) Is it possible?
Thanks,
Jack
1. Yes, it will have to traverse between your eql to the back upbox and then back to the eql. It would be nice if it could somehow be aware that it was writing back to itself, maybe some of the new features that are coming out with new firmware will take care of this, or we can request it!
2. You can backup to local storage, you just select that as the target.
Thanks, may be VAAI could really help in this case.
Btw, I’ve upgraded EQL box to FW 5.02 and will install MEM 1.0 on ESX 4.1 host this weekend, just want to ask where do I/how do I enable VAAI and then I will see under storage that my volume wil become Hardware Accelerated?
sorry Michael, I haven’t really install Veeam B&R yet, so I didn’t read the manual yet.
and I was wondering are the followings DOS commands that we type in a Comand Prompt?
automount disable
automount scrub
exit
or does the above anywhere mentioned in Veeam’s document?
Thanks again,
Jack
For SAN only based backups, the Veeam Console needs to have read access to the LUNS on the SAN containing the VMFS volumes.
Michael, do you know how do we limit Veeam Backup to have read access on EQL only? When I created a volume for VMFS, I have to enable Read and Write, also for cluster (ie, multiple access), there is no way to limit a specific iSCSI initiator for read only on EQL volume.
Thanks,
Jack
They currently don’t offer this feature (at least as far as I know, I have asked for it though, you should put in a feature request as well!)
Have you seen any issues with automount being re-enabled after OS Updates? There is another blog/post here http://jpaul.me/?p=334 where “Jim” states this has happened to him. Was this likely caused by not using the automount scrub command?
Hi,
Could you explain what you mean by “Add each esx host (authenticate by clicking on each esx host)”?
I’m running Veeam 7 and don’t see option to add hosts.
I’m having problem with non working direct SAN access. Do I really need the eql hit kit?