Release Information for NetApp ONTAP Plug-In for Veeam Backup & Replication

Veeam Backup & Replication has provided built-in NetApp ONTAP storage snapshot integration for years. To avoid conflicts between the built-in integration and the new NetApp ONTAP plug-in (USAPI integration), consider the following:

• Using the same cluster or SVM with the same storage role simultaneously for both built-in integration and USAPI integration is not allowed. To migrate a specific cluster or SVM from built-in integration, you must first remove it from Veeam Backup & Replication and then re-add it using the NetApp ONTAP plug-in. This means creating new jobs; existing snapshots will not be subject to retention by the new jobs, so snapshot retention information for that storage will be lost.
• Using the same cluster simultaneously in both built-in and USAPI integration is allowed, provided each integration uses a different storage role. For example, MyCluster1 can be added with the NAS role in built-in integration and with the VMware role in USAPI integration.
• Replication technologies are not supported between systems added through different integration types. All clusters participating in a replication relationship must be added through the same integration type, either built-in or USAPI.

The following are known issues and limitations for the NetApp ONTAP Plug-In for Veeam Backup & Replication.

General

• This plug-in does not support NAS integration (unstructured data backup). For this, you need to use Veeam built-in integration.
• Before adding the storage system to the backup infrastructure, make sure a valid FlexClone license is installed on the NetApp storage system. Otherwise, backup and restore tasks will fail.

Replication Support and Scope

• Veeam Backup & Replication does not support backup from storage snapshots or snapshot orchestration on the secondary storage array for the replication features listed below. However, you can still use volumes with these features configured as sources for backup from storage snapshots or snapshot-only jobs on the primary storage array.
  • MetroCluster
  • SVM-DR
  • SnapMirror Active Sync (formerly SnapMirror Business Continuity)
• If individual SVMs (rather than entire clusters) are added to Veeam Backup & Replication, cross-cluster SnapMirror relationships are not supported for them, since the information required to build such relationships cannot be collected from within a single SVM's context.
• If both the source and target SVMs of a cross-cluster SnapMirror Active Sync relationship are added to Veeam Backup & Replication individually, backup jobs may fail due to a conflict between identical volume SCSI IDs.

MetroCluster

• In a MetroCluster configuration where entire clusters are added to Veeam Backup & Replication, snapshots created before a switchback are no longer covered by retention management after the switchover and switchback, and such snapshots must be deleted manually. This does not apply when Veeam Backup & Replication works with individual SVMs; retention continues to work correctly with no additional action required.
• In a MetroCluster configuration where entire clusters are added to Veeam Backup & Replication, a switchover requires a rescan (storage discovery) of the active node to update information about active volumes. This is not required when Veeam Backup & Replication works with individual SVMs.

SnapMirror Synchronous

• SnapMirror Synchronous support requires ONTAP 9.14.1 or later.
• If a volume participating in SnapMirror Synchronous replication is used only for source-side backups (without snapshot orchestration), VeeamAUX snapshots are synchronized to the target automatically via SM-S technology but are not removed from the target when the backup job completes. These snapshots are deleted from the target automatically every 6 hours, per the default Sync policy.

SnapMirror Asynchronous

• If a SnapMirror relationship uses the async-mirror policy type with all snapshots mirrored, retention settings specified in Veeam Backup & Replication for target snapshots are ignored, and only the source snapshot retention settings are applied. If snapshot orchestration is not configured on the source, target retention defaults to 1.
• For volumes participating in a SnapMirror Asynchronous relationship, the immutability period of target snapshots cannot be shorter than that of the source snapshots, including zero. If a job is configured otherwise, the target immutability period is automatically adjusted to match the source.
• Backing up from a SnapMirror Asynchronous target on ASA r2 is not supported if SnapLock is enabled on the target volume.
• Storage Efficiency (deduplication) is supported for target volumes. However, depending on storage load and replication activity, ONTAP may take a variable amount of time to automatically start the snapshot deduplication process after a transfer completes. Deduplication changes the snapshot ID, so the plug-in waits before checking for the updated ID; this wait time is controlled by the postTransferDwellTimeSeconds setting (60 seconds by default) and can be adjusted if needed.

Consistency Group Replication (ASA r2)

• Consistency Group-level replication is supported for ASA r2 only. For all other storage families, replication support is limited to the volume level.
• Since SnapMirror replication for ASA r2 is performed at the Consistency Group (CG) level, target-side snapshot orchestration and retention apply to the entire CG snapshot as a single unit rather than per volume. If volumes within the same CG are protected by jobs with different retention settings, the effective retention for every volume in the group is capped to the shortest retention configured among those jobs, meaning that snapshots for volumes with a longer configured retention may be removed earlier than expected once a job with shorter retention performs cleanup. Source-side snapshots (both backup and orchestration) are unaffected and continue to be managed per volume as usual.

Tamperproof Snapshots

• Tamperproof Snapshots are not supported on ASA r2.
• Tamperproof Snapshots are supported only when the entire cluster is added to Veeam Backup & Replication; individual SVMs are not supported.
• Tamperproof Snapshots support requires ONTAP 9.12.1 or later (9.19.1 or later for SnapMirror Synchronous) and a SnapLock license.

NFS

• Restoring NFSv3 volumes is not supported on some ONTAP versions when a Load-Sharing Mirror for root volumes (root ls mirror) is configured. For details, see NetApp KB CONTAP-95735.
• During NFS volume backup, the plug-in uses temporary export policies for auxiliary clones. For proxies and hosts to access these temporary NFS shares, the corresponding export permissions must also be granted on the root NFS share of the SVM. For security reasons, the plug-in does not add these rules to the root volume export policy automatically, so you must configure them manually. To let the plug-in create these rules automatically instead, set autoCreateRootVolumeExportRules = true in the configuration file.