To use storage snapshots for data protection and disaster recovery operations, you must add the storage system to the backup infrastructure. If you plan to work with secondary storage arrays, you must add them to the backup infrastructure as well.
When you add the storage system, Veeam Backup Free Edition automatically rescans it. As part of the rescan process, Veeam Backup Free Edition performs the following operations:
- Veeam Backup Free Edition retrieves information about the storage system topology.
- Veeam Backup Free Edition retrieves information about VMware vSphere datastores from the VMware vCenter Server and matches storage volumes to these datastores. Matching helps Veeam Backup Free Edition understand what VMs host their disks on storage volumes. It also helps Veeam Backup Free Edition get information about VMs on storage snapshots. Veeam Backup Free Edition assumes that disks of VMs located on storage volumes are also located on storage snapshots.
- Veeam Backup Free Edition rescans storage snapshots. As a result of snapshot rescan, Veeam Backup Free Edition knows exactly what disks of what VMs are hosted on storage snapshots. If for some reason Veeam Backup Free Edition fails to rescan all storage snapshots, it rescans the last storage snapshot in the hierarchy and propagates the retrieved information to other storage snapshots.
The topology of the storage system added to the backup infrastructure is displayed in the Storage Infrastructure view in the Veeam Backup Free Edition console. Storage snapshots are also displayed in the inventory pane of the Home view, under the Storage snapshots node.
You can add the following storage systems to the backup infrastructure:
- Dell EMC
- IBM Spectrum Virtualize
- Universal Storage API Integrated Systems
- HPE StoreVirtual
- HPE 3PAR StoreServ
- NetApp
- Nimble
- Cisco HyperFlex
