The Backup Module requires the creation of a Volume Set. A Volume Set is a friendly name for a set of drive letters and mount points configured in Windows Server that are Volumes on the FlashArray. Once a Volume Set is defined, Protection Group snapshots that are crash consistent can be taken of the Volumes associated with the Volume Set. This means that the volume shadow copy service (VSS) is not required. A snapshot generated can then be mounted one or more times to a destination using the same disk type as the source Volume.
The reason that Hyper-V passthrough disks do not work with Backup Module is that while Invoke-PsbSnapshotJob will work to create snapshots, you cannot mount what was generated because the logic to connect the disk to the Hyper-V virtual machine does not exist. You will see the error shown in Figure 5. Customers will need to file a request for enhancement (RFE).
Figure 5. Mount error with Hyper-V passthrough disks
Currently, Backup Module only supports a target that is a physical or virtual Windows Server-based deployment regardless of workload. The reason for this is that specifying a disk path is required. VMs can be Hyper-V or VMware-based. Physical servers can have storage attached via iSCSI or fibre channel. VMs support the following connectivity methods for Volumes:
- In-guest iSCSI
- Virtual fibre channel
- Raw Device Mapping (pRDM) disks (VMware only)
- Virtual Volume (vVol) disks (VMware only)
Passthrough disks in Hyper-V are currently not supported. If passthrough disks in Hyper-V or Linux support is important to your environment, work with your Pure AE/SE to file a request for enhancement (RFE).
Details for the parameters associated with each cmdlet are documented in Parameter Reference.