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Backup job creation
18 Dell EMC SC Series: Veeam Backup & Replication Integration | 4061-SC-SG
When storage snapshots are used, the vSphere snapshot is only open for a brief time. In addition, the proxy
server accesses the VM data from SC Series storage directly over the Fibre Channel or iSCSI fabric. The
same process is represented in the following points and uses relative times as an example:
1. vSphere snapshot is opened for quiesce and data consistency (5 seconds)
2. SC Series snapshot is created (1 second)
3. vSphere snapshot is closed (5 seconds, minimized risk of corruption)
4. SC Series view volume from above snapshot is mapped to proxy server (1 second)
5. VM data to be backed up is streamed from view volume to backup repository (hours)
6. SC Series view volume from above snapshot is unmapped from proxy server (1 second)
7. SC Series view volume from above snapshot is deleted (1 second)
8. SC Series snapshot is expired (1 second)
Note: For this type of backup job, the SC Series snapshot is transient and is expired by Veeam when the
backup job completes.
4.2 SC Series snapshot
If backing up VM data to SC Series snapshots, choose the Dell EMC SC Series Snapshot backup repository
in the backup job. Locate the backup repository choice in the Storage section of the backup job configuration.
With this type of backup job, Veeam bypasses the use of a backup chain and the VM data is essentially
backed up to an SC Series snapshot. The effective data retention is controlled by the value of Restore points
to keep on disk. In this case, this value is similar to SC Series storage snapshot retention. The storage
snapshots are created with no expiration and Veeam will expire the snapshots once the data retention value
has been surpassed by a given snapshot. If a backup job is deleted, the unexpired storage snapshots tied to
the backup job are orphaned on the array. These will need to be manually cleaned up later or they will remain
there forever since they were created with no expiration. This process could be audited and automated
through PowerShell since both Veeam and SC Series storage support their own set of operational
management cmdlets.