So far Veeam has been treating me well. When backing up multiple VM’s at the same time it really does peg out the processor. I’m glad I choose to install into physical instead of virtual.

I of course had an iSCSI attached volume that veeam can’t ‘see’ so I had to remedy that by moving mailboxes all over crime and creation. Gave me a

Discovery phase failed.
Cannot add volumes to the snapshot set.
Cannot add a volume to the snapshot set. Volume name: [\\?\Volume{fca370fa-f010-11de-b405-005056b07383}\].
Cannot add volume to the set of volumes that should be shadowed.
VSS error: VSS_E_PROVIDER_VETO. Code:0x80042306

But this was to be expected. After creating a new volume (I love how easy I can add and remove disk in vsphere!!! too slick) I learned the hard way about block size (mine of course was too small)

This was the error vsphere\veeam threw

CreateSnapshot failed, vmRef “vm-32”, timeout “1800000”, snName “VEEAM BACKUP TEMPORARY SNAPSHOT”, snDescription “Please do not delete this snapshot. It is being used by Veeam Backup.”, memory “False”, quiesce “False”
File <unspecified filename> is larger than the maximum size supported by datastore ‘<unspecified datastore>

After remedying this http://blog.vmpros.nl/2010/02/04/vmware-creating-a-snapshot-for-a-virtual-machine-fails-with-the-error-file-is-larger-than-maximum-file-size-supported-1012384/

So now I am in the process of backing up our Exchange server. I still am researching the whole VSS integration thing, but this post lays it out pretty well

http://virtualy-anything.blogspot.com/2010/02/understanding-vss-in-vmware-backups.html

And this cleared up for me the concept of synthetic backups

http://veeammeup.com/2008/08/veeam-synthetic-backup-explained.html

This also cleared up my question on how I should group my VM’s

We recommend grouping similar VMs (deployed from one template or based on the same OS) to one job to get best de-duplication ratio, in this case with compression enabled (which is the main weapon against white spaces) you’ll save lots of backup storage space.

I also really like the fact that these backups don’t impact the network at all! SAN based backup is awesome!