Requirements and Limitations

If you plan to use CDP to protect your workloads, consider the following requirements and limitations.

Licensing

CDP is included in the Veeam Universal License. When using a legacy socket-based license, the Enterprise Plus edition is required.

Platforms and Datastores

Infrastructure Components

  • The backup server must have at least 16 GB RAM.
  • VMware CDP proxy must meet the requirements listed in section VMware CDP Proxy.
  • The network between the infrastructure components must suit the load on your infrastructure. We recommend that you use at least 100 Mbps network. Slower networks cannot handle the generated disk traffic without interruption. The better performance is proven on 10 Gbps networks or faster and MTU 9000.
  • You must configure CDP for one cluster on one backup server only. If you add a cluster to another backup server and install the I/O filter (filter required for CDP) on it, CDP policies on the first backup server will fail. For more information on the I/O filter, see I/O Filter.
  • The maximum number of CDP policies that can be created on one backup server is 100.
  • If you add a new cluster to the vCenter server after the I/O filter is installed on the existing clusters, you need to install the I/O filter manually on the newly added cluster. To do that, open the I/O Filter Management wizard, make sure that check boxes are selected near all clusters where the I/O filter must be present and finish the wizard.

Virtual Machines

  • Sizes of all VM disks must be set as integer values.
  • VMs that you plan to protect must not have snapshots at the moment the CDP policy starts for the first time. For example, if a VM is already added to a backup job, make sure that the scheduled backup session does not overlap with the CDP policy first run.
  • The hardware versions of VMs that you plan to protect must be supported on the target cluster.
  • CDP works only for powered on VMs. However, for VMs with IDE hard drives you must power off VMs before the initial synchronization. This is required to apply a new storage policy to VMs. For more information, see How CDP Works.
  • CDP is not supported for VMs to which VM storage policies with multiple datastore specific rule sets apply. If you need to define datastores to be used for placement of the VMs, you can add a tag rule for vSAN instead of a tag based placement datastore specific rule. For more information on how to create tag rules for vSAN, see VMware Docs.
  • Shared disks, physical RDM and SCSI bus sharing are not supported. Note that vRDM disks are supported.
  • If you enable VM encryption on VMware side, make sure that the Allow I/O filters before encryption parameter is set to True in the Default encryption properties storage policy component.
  • One VM can be processed only by one CDP policy.
  • During the initial synchronization, Veeam Backup & Replication needs double space allocation for VMs with thick-provisioned disks on the target host. After the initial synchronization finishes, Veeam Backup & Replication frees half of the allocated space for such VMs. This is a part of mechanism required to support protection of disks newly added to the source VMs.
  • The maximum number of disks attached to one VM is 50.
  • The maximum number of long-term restore points per disk is 95.

Replicas

  • On the target host, Veeam Backup & Replication does not allow you to migrate replicas using VMware vSphere Storage vMotion. Note that host vMotion is allowed.
  • Replicas can be powered on only using the failover operation; powering on replicas manually is not supported.
  • Testing CDP replicas in Virtual Labs is currently not supported.

Related Topics

Backup Infrastructure for CDP

Page updated 1/23/2024

Page content applies to build 12.1.1.56