Before You Begin

Before you create a backup job, consider the following limitations:

• You cannot back up workers and Nutanix Controller VMs.
• You cannot back up Windows 11 VMs due to AOS 6.6 technical limitations related to Virtual Trusted Platform Module (vTPM) support. For more information on vTPM VM configuration, see Nutanix documentation.

• The way Veeam Backup for Nutanix AHV creates image-level backups depends on whether you choose to protect individual virtual machines, protection domains or the whole cluster while creating the job:

If the backup job includes individual virtual machines, as well as the whole Prism Central, category or cluster, Veeam Backup for Nutanix AHV creates a snapshot of each VM and a VG snapshot of each volume group, and then produces image-level backups using the created snapshots. This approach cannot guarantee full consistency of VM and volume group data.

If the backup job includes protection domains, Veeam Backup for Nutanix AHV creates a PD snapshot of all VMs and volume groups added to the same consistency group in each protection domain. This approach guarantees full data consistency. However, Veeam Backup for Nutanix AHV takes PD snapshots only if application-aware processing is disabled in job settings and the following requirements are met for each protection domain included into the backup job:

• The protection domain does not contain multiple VMs with the same name.
• VMs and their volume groups belong to the same protection domain.
• VMs and their volume groups are included into one consistency group of the protection domain.
• CHAP authentication is disabled for the volume groups.

If any of those requirements are not met, Veeam Backup for Nutanix AHV backs up VMs and their volume groups as if processing individual virtual machines.

• When processing a VM, Veeam Backup for Nutanix AHV always tries to produce an application-consistent backup using Nutanix Guest Tools. However, if the requirements for application-consistent snapshots that are used to create application-consistent backups are not met, Veeam Backup for Nutanix AHV creates a crash-consistent backup instead.

If you want to create an application-consistent backup using the Veeam technology, you can configure application-aware processing settings for each resource included into the backup job. This will also allow you to periodically back up and truncate transaction logs.

• [Applies only to the Prism Central deployment] If you want to back up VMs using data obtained from snapshots on replica clusters, ensure that you have scheduled Prism Central protection policies to take snapshots more frequent than the backup job runs.
• By default, backup encryption is disabled for backed-up data. However, you can enable encryption at the repository level as described in the Veeam Backup & Replication User Guide, section Access Permissions.
• VM guest OS file indexing is not supported for backups created with Veeam Backup for Nutanix AHV.
• Since Veeam Backup & Replication does not allow you to assign information about locations to Nutanix AHV clusters and backup appliances, job statistics do not include information on the Nutanix AHV VM data migration between different geographic regions.