VMware vSphere • ESXi, Veeam, and Fiber Channel Assistance

Hello,

I've got an environment that consists of a single ESXi host and a Dell ME4024 SAN using direct connect fiber channel. I'm looking at setting up a Veeam solution by which we'll have high availability. I'm planning on installing an additional ESXi host (both with two dual-port HBAs) and Synology NAS, both of which are fiber channel capable. I'm familiar with this type of configuration using iSCSI but am not very familiar with fiber channel.

My question is as follows:

If I want my Veeam backup server to be a virtual machine running on one of my ESXi hosts, how can I present the LUN on my Synology NAS to the Veeam backup server as a backup repository in a way that makes sense? Veeam does not recommend configuring your backup repository on top of a VMDK, so simply adding my NAS LUN as a datastore to vCenter seems like it isn't an option.

Could I use PCIe passthrough on my Veeam backup server VM settings for the fiber channel HBA that points directly to the LUN on the NAS, then configure that storage as ReFS or NTFS? Or should I do something else?

Thanks for any and all advice!

Statistics: Posted by wabash2015 — Feb 07, 2025 10:52 pm

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