Limitations for Scale-Out Backup Repositories

Scale-out backup repositories have the following limitations:

• The scale-out backup repository functionality is available in the Enterprise and Enterprise Plus editions of Veeam Backup & Replication.

If you configure a scale-out backup repository and then downgrade to the Standard license, you will not be able to run jobs targeted at the scale-out backup repository. However, you will be able to perform restore from the scale-out backup repository.

• You cannot use the scale-out backup repository as a target for the following types of jobs:

• Configuration backup job
• Replication jobs (including replica seeding)
• VM copy jobs
• Veeam Agent backup jobs created by Veeam Agent for Microsoft Windows 1.5 or earlier  
• Veeam Agent backup jobs created by Veeam Agent for Linux 1.0 Update 1 or earlier.

• You cannot add a backup repository as a performance extent to the scale-out backup repository if any job of unsupported type is targeted at this backup repository or if the backup repository contains data produced by jobs of unsupported types (for example, replica metadata). To add such backup repository as a performance extent, you must first target unsupported jobs to another backup repository and remove the job data from the backup repository in question.

• Scale-out backup repositories do not support rotated drives. If you enable the This repository is backed by rotated hard drives setting on an extent, Veeam Backup & Replication will ignore this setting and will work with such repository as with a standard performance extent.

• If a backup repository is added as a performance extent to the scale-out backup repository, you cannot use it as a regular backup repository. You cannot target jobs to this backup repository. Instead, you have to target jobs to the configured scale-out backup repository.
• You cannot add a scale-out backup repository as a performance extent to another scale-out backup repository.
• You cannot add a backup repository as a performance extent if this backup repository is already added as an extent to another scale-out backup repository.
• You cannot add a backup repository as a performance extent if this backup repository is already used as a backup destination by vCloud Director organizations.
• You cannot add a backup repository in which some activity is being performed (for example, a backup job or restore task) as a performance extent to the scale-out backup repository.
• If you use Enterprise edition of Veeam Backup & Replication, you can create 2 scale-out backup repositories.

For each scale-out backup repository, you can add 1 object storage repository as a capacity extent and 4 standard backup repositories as performance extents: 3 active, and 1 inactive (that is put to the Maintenance mode). You can add inactive extents, for example, if any of active extents has no free space, and you want to evacuate backup data from it.

If you add 4 performance extents and do not put any of them to the Maintenance mode, the jobs targeted at the scale-out backup repository will fail.

Enterprise Plus edition has no limitations on the number of scale-out backup repositories or performance extents.

• The Extract and Backup Validator utilities do not work with backups stored in scale-out backup repositories.

• To let Veeam Backup & Replication automatically import backups during rescan of a scale-out backup repository, names of VBM files and paths to VBM files (starting from the backup repository root to VBM files) must contain only allowed characters:

• Alphanumeric characters: a-zA-Z0-9
• Special characters: _-.+=@^

Names of VBM file and paths to VBM files must not contain spaces.

If a name of a VBM file or a path to a VBM file contains prohibited characters, Veeam Backup & Replication will fail to import such backup during rescan of the scale-out backup repository. To import such backup, you can replace prohibited characters with the underscore character, for example: C:\My Repository\Backup_Job\Backup_Job.vbm. You do not need to rename backup files themselves.

• Veeam Backup & Replication does not split one backup file across multiple extents.
• You cannot assign the role of a cache repository for file share backup to a scale-out backup repository and its extents. To learn more about cache repository, see NAS Backup Support.
• If a repository is being used as a cloud repository, you cannot add it as an extent of a scale-out backup repository.