No matter what segment of technology we are talking about, unique terms and a never-ending acronym soup seems to follow us. Veeam Backup & Replication has a number of terms that may be used as well. These can be shown in the product itself, discussed in the forums or even in these very blogs. Here is a rundown of five common terms in the product:
- SAN/NBD mode – This denotes that the Direct SAN access mode is being utilized for a job within Veeam Backup & Replication. The SAN part of the acronym stands for storage area network and the NBD part stands for network block device, which is the failover mechanism if SAN mode can’t occur. This is the most optimal configuration for backup jobs , as the Veeam backup server communicates directly to the storage target to perform the backup. This can be an iSCSI target or fibre channel storage networks. If you have a choice on which mode to use, choose Direct SAN access!
- Seeding – This is the process of performing the first pass of a job (such as a replication job) to removable media. In this way, the initial replication pass can leverage the quick access speeds of the local network. Further iterations of the job will only manage changes, which is optimal for low-bandwidth connections.
- Application-aware processing or quiescing – This is the process of quieting a parts of a virtual machine. This is usually performed on an application or the file system. When it is made quiet, backups can be taken in a consistent state. For Windows systems, leveraging application-aware processing with Volume Shadow Copy Services (VSS) within Veeam Backup & Replication will properly quiesce (or prepare) the application for a backup, the option within the user interface is “Application-Aware Processing.”
- Source and target – The source would be where the virtual machines reside on production (or primary) storage. The target is the destination to which the backups are made. For Veeam Backup & Replication, a number of targets are available to hold backup data. This includes iSCSI targets, deduplication appliances, NAS or CIFS shares, fibre channel LUNs, direct attached disk or storage on NFS resources. The target can also be called the backup repository, which would hold all of the Veeam data. Additionally, when referring to replication, the target is the host and datastore that you are replicating to.
- Hot-add – This is frequently used when referring to virtual appliance mode backups within Veeam Backup & Replication. Basically, once the virtual machine backup is underway; the associated VMDK files are added dynamically to the Veeam backup server. This dynamic procedure can only happen when the virtual machine has a snapshot in place, and then the VMDK files of the source virtual machine are disconnected from the Veeam backup server once the backup steps are completed. Further, this option is only available when Veeam Backup & Replication is installed on a virtual machine. Veeam Backup & Replication has supported Hot-add mode since version 4, released in 2009.
This is just the tip of the iceberg! What terms within the product are you looking for answers on? Share your questions and comments below.
