Limitations for Scale-Out Backup Repositories

Scale-out backup repositories have the following limitations:

• You cannot use a 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 an 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 an 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 extent.

• If a backup repository is added as an 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 an extent to another scale-out backup repository.
• You cannot add a backup repository as an extent if this backup repository is already added as an extent to another scale-out backup repository.
• You cannot add a backup repository as an extent if this backup repository is already used as a backup destination by VMware Cloud Director organizations.
• You cannot add a backup repository in which some activity is being performed (for example, a backup job or restore task) as an extent to the scale-out backup repository.
• You cannot use scale-out backup repository to keep configuration backups.

• You cannot assign the role of a cache repository for file backup or object storage backup to a scale-out backup repository and its extents. To learn more about the cache repository, see the Backup Infrastructure for Unstructured Data Backup section.

• You can add only one type of object storage repositories as performance extents of one scale-out backup repository. For example, if the first extent is an Amazon S3 object storage repository, the second extent must also be an Amazon S3 object storage repository.
• You cannot use the backup repository and the direct object storage repository for the same performance tier.
• Data located in object storage repositories is organized into a separate backup chain for every machine in a job.
• We do not recommend adding more than 16 extents to one tier within one scale-out backup repository, otherwise you might have performance issues.
• If you use immutability and have several extents in your performance tier, you must enable it for all extents within this tier. You cannot use mixed configuration and have only one extent with immutability enabled.

• If you apply the Forget or Remove from disk options to a missing restore point in a scale-out backup repository, the backup file associated with the missing restore point will be deleted from capacity tier and archive tier on the next offload and archiving job run.

• If you use Enterprise edition of Veeam Backup & Replication, you can create two scale-out backup repositories.
• [For Enterprise edition of Veeam Backup & Replication] For each scale-out backup repository, you can have either backup repositories or object storage repositories added as a performance extent or a capacity extent. You can have 2 active, and 1 inactive (that is, put to the Maintenance mode) performance or capacity extents. 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.
• [For Enterprise edition of Veeam Backup & Replication] If you add four performance extents and do not put any of them to the Maintenance mode, the jobs targeted at the scale-out backup repository will fail.
• Veeam Universal License and Enterprise Plus editions have no limitations on the number of scale-out backup repositories or performance extents and capacity extents.

• If you want to use the Extract utility to work with backup files located on any of the extents of your scale-out backup repository, make sure that incremental and full backup files are located on the same extent.
• You can use the Veeam Backup Validator utility only for backups stored in the performance tier which consists of backup repositories (except object storage repositories). Make sure that incremental and full backup files are located on the same extent.

• If you want to add an object storage repository added as a capacity or performance extent to another backup server, you must switch this object storage repository to the Maintenance mode on the initial server. Note that the secondary server will request the ownership over the object storage repository. After you change the ownership, the backup jobs (except for the offload job to capacity tier) will fail on the primary backup server.

• 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, not including the root itself) 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 the actual backup files.

• Veeam Backup & Replication does not split one backup file across multiple extents.
• If a repository is used as a cloud repository, you cannot add it as an extent of a scale-out backup repository. For more information, see Veeam Cloud Connect.
• [For Nutanix AHV VM backups] Due to specifics of backup jobs for AHV VMs, Veeam Backup for Nutanix AHV always creates a separate backup chain for each VM added to a backup job. Thus, even if you clear the Use per-machine backup files check box in the advanced settings of a scale-out backup repository, backups of multiple AHV VMs are not stored in a single backup file.