The following is a short overview and guide to help you plan and prepare for your NetApp and Veeam deployment. The two most significant are that Veeam can access the NetApp volumes during Backup from Storage Snapshot operations - which is not the case with iSCSI and FC which requires to clone and map LUNs - and NFS also shortens storage scan, backup and restore times. Pairing Veeam and NetApp via NFS also has several specific benefits. Overall, I would say that if you are designing a new environment from scratch, it’s a very good idea to consider NFS as your backend storage protocol between VMware, NetApp and Veeam.

Easier design of the volume and datastore relation.

The fact that the VMDK is simply a file in the ONTAP file system which results in direct deduplication and compression savings.

In general, there are many reasons to choose NFS as your protocol, including: However, NFS is becoming a more common choice in the last few years due to growing adoption and standardization of 10, 25 and now 40 Gbit/s Ethernet as well as the NFS v4 implementation within vSphere 6. There are several supported protocols for connecting VMware to a NetApp storage system to achieve better Availability for your critical applications and data. Because of the high level of interest, let me share some insights based on our latest configuration and best practices for NetApp, Veeam and NFS that can help save you time and effort when installing and configuring Veeam for the first time. I’ve received many inquiries about the Veeam and NetApp integration with NFS over the last few months.

Veeam backup 9.5 best practices