Storage Discovery Process
The Storage Discovery process performs rescan of the whole storage system or selected volumes. It can be performed against the following nodes in the storage system hierarchy: vendor, storage system, storage volume. In case you have limited rescan scope, storage discovery will be performed only for included volumes. For details, see Limiting Rescan Scope.
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If only Veeam Agents backup processing is selected for a storage system, storage volumes are not displayed and rescan of selected volumes is not available. |
During the rescan, the Storage Discovery process gets and updates the necessary information regarding the storage systems added to Veeam Backup & Replication. This is necessary for the backup and restore processes using storage integration.
Stages of Rescan
- [For VMware, NAS, Veeam Agent integration] General infrastructure
Receiving storage system information.
- Defining the storage system data hierarchy (volumes, shares, LUNs, snapshots).
- Getting the information about each volume added to rescan scope (name, ID, size, SCSI Unique ID for LUNs, local paths for shares).
- Defining basic information about storage snapshots (name, id, creation time).
- Getting information about storage adapters (targets).
- Receiving other relevant information.
- [For VMware, NAS, Veeam Agent integration] Availability from backup proxies
Verifying the possibility of using proxies for backup/rescan/data transmission directly from the storage systems.
- Analyzing the selected proxies and checking iSCSI/NFS/CIFS servers availability from these proxies.
- Matching proxies with available servers. The LUNs/share files available from these servers are considered available from the relevant proxies.
Availability through Fibre Channel is not checked. If a proxy is added to a storage system list, the access is considered set.
- [For VMware integration] vCenter/ESXi rescan
- Identifying the list of vCenter/ESXi datastores added to Veeam Backup & Replication.
- Matching the vCenter/ESXi datastores with volumes (LUNs/share files) added to Veeam Backup & Replication. Making the list of VMs located on datastores.
- Creating/updating information files for the VMs in the snapshots of relevant volumes.
If the VMFS/NFS rescan has not been executed for a volume earlier, we assume that all the snapshots of the volume are for those VMs that have been in the datastore at the moment of rescan.
If the VMFS/NFS rescan has been executed for a volume earlier, Veeam Backup & Replication skips the next step (updating the VMware hosts information for each VM).
- Updating the VMware hosts information for each VM.
- [For VMware integration] VMFS/NFS rescan
Scanning the snapshot file system.
- Identifying the snapshot file system type.
- If the snapshot file system type corresponds with VMFS or NFS: searching for the .vmx files located in the snapshots.
Thus the system identifies the VMs located in the snapshots. If this stage has not been performed for these snapshots earlier, the snapshot content shown in Veeam Backup & Replication may be changed on this stage: some VMs may be added or deleted.
- Defining the VMs size.
How to Start Storage Discovery
The following actions and processes initiate the Storage Discovery process:
The Storage Monitor process runs in the background. Every 10 minutes the process checks:
- Appearance or removal of snapshots in the supervised volumes,
- Changes in the snapshot names in the supervised volumes,
- Changes in the name of the supervised volume itself,
- Appearance or removal of volumes (including changes due to alteration in the rescan scope Volumes to scan).
- Alteration in a snapshot starts rescan of the volume,
- Alteration in a volume starts rescan of the storage system.
Rescan of all storage systems, including all rescan stages, starts once a week.
Rescan of all storage systems without VMFS/NFS Rescan.
Rescan of all storage systems without vCenter/ESXi and VMFS/NFS Rescan.
Complete rescan of all storage systems.
Rescan of storage systems with NAS integration.
Rescan of the added storage system, all stages included.
To manually start storage discovery:
- Open the Storage Infrastructure view.
- In the inventory pane, expand the storage system tree.
- Select a node in the storage system hierarchy: vendor, storage system or volume.
- Click Rescan on the ribbon or right-click the node in the hierarchy and select Rescan storage or Rescan volume.
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The rescan operation is performed only for volumes included in the rescan scope. For information how to change the rescan scope, see Limiting Rescan Scope. |