Veeam – Hitachi Storage Plugin Installation How-To

 

Recently on July 21st, there was a new storage plugin release by @Veeam for the Hitachi storage arrays.  It can be found here – Veeam – Hitachi Plugin.  This plugin allows you to connect Veeam to your Hitachi storage arrays to leverage the SAN-based snapshots for your backups.  Hitachi has also released documentation which can be found here – Hitachi – Veeam Plugin.

Hitachi Plug-In for Veeam Backup & Replication supports integration with the following storage systems:

• VSP E590, E790, E990 (93-03-01-60/00 or later),
• VSP F350, F370, F700, F900 (88-07-01-x0/00 or later),
• VSP G350, G370, G700, G900 (88-07-01-x0/00 or later),
• VSP 5000 series (90-05-01-00/00 or later)

Today I am going to walk through the installation and configuration of the plugin within the Veeam software.  This will show how easy the plugin is to install and configure within the Veeam environment.  One thing to note is that you need to take a look at the Hitachi documentation so that you can configure the access for the Veeam Proxies to be able to leverage the backup from snapshot technology otherwise any jobs will fail if the failover mode is not selected.

First, you need to download the Hitachi plugin from the link above and extract the zip file.  You will then see the executable file that you need to run – “HitachiPlugin_1.0.66.exe”.  Double-click on this file to start the plugin installation wizard showing the initial screen –

Click Next, accept the agreement, click Next again then Install.  This will then install the plugin to be accessed via the Veeam console so click Finish once completed. (***NOTE: This will stop and restart the Veeam backup service so ensure to have a maintenance window***)

Open your Veeam console and go to the “Storage infrastructure” tab to click on the Add Storage toolbar button or link on the right side of the screen –

Once you click the Add Storage option you are presented with which vendor you want to add.  Hitachi does not appear on the first screen and you need to click the Show More Vendors option to get to the second screen to see Hitachi listed.

After you click the HITACHI vendor option the wizard opens up and depending on if you are using Veeam v10 or v11 the wizard may look slightly different as seen below.  Also, another thing to note is when you type in the “DNS name or IP Address” it must be that of one of the controllers on your Hitachi array.  You cannot use the SVP IP address for access.

The new Storage Role information can be found at this link in regards to their function – Veeam – Storage Role.  Once you select either or of these “Roles” other options will appear in the wizard to select some options for either VMware or Microsoft Windows –

After you select your options and finish the wizard it will do a storage infrastructure scan to find the volumes within the Hitachi array.  Once complete you see something like this in the tree –

This now completes adding your array to Veeam for snapshot backups.  If you have followed the Hitachi documentation to ensure proper access you can now configure your Proxies as well as your jobs to back up from Storage Snapshots.  Be sure to enable the fallback method to NBD just in case something is not configured correctly so that your jobs do no fail.  You can then review the documentation and configurations to correct settings then test again.

Be sure to read the documentation noted at the beginning of this blog article to ensure you get everything set up the correct way.  Enjoy backing up from storage snapshots with @Hitachi!