Virtual Appliance Mode for VMs on VSAN

To transport data of VMs residing on VSAN in the Virtual appliance mode, you must assign the VMware backup proxy role to a VM.

The VMware backup proxy VM must meet the following requirements:

• The VMware backup proxy VM must reside on an ESXi host connected to a VSAN cluster.

Veeam Backup & Replication will retrieve data of processed VMs over the I/O stack of the ESXi host on which the VMware backup proxy is deployed.

• Disks of the VMware backup proxy VM must reside on the VSAN datastore.

If you have several backup proxies on ESXi hosts in the VSAN cluster, Veeam Backup & Replication chooses the most appropriate VMware backup proxy to reduce the backup traffic on the VSAN cluster network. To choose a VMware backup proxy, Veeam Backup & Replication checks HDDs directly attached to every ESXi host and calculates the amount of VM data on these HDDs. The preference is given to the ESXi host that has a direct access to an HDD with the maximum amount of VM data. This approach helps reduce workload on the ESXi I/O stack during data transport.