NBU 7.6 for VMware and transport mode SAN

[larjona]

Hi

This is my enviroment:

Master / Media server on the same host: Windows 2012 R2 physical server with FC dual port connected to a two fabric SAN Brocade 6505.

vCenter 5.1 on a virtual machine Windows 2012 R2.

Backup virtual machines from 15 ESXi 5.1 host.

I want to use SAN transport mode. I find that the only method is configure FC zoning to let's NBU media server access to VMFS-5 formated LUNS by ESXi host. Then, from windows disk administrator console, I found these LUNS and appears like the image I attach to this post.

I'm afraid if someone decides mistakenly put online the disk and reformat to NTFS.

Is there any way to prevent this problem?

My configuration method is correct? Now, I can backup my virtual machines faster than NBD tranport mode, but I need to trust on these settings to aboid problems.

[Nicolai · Accepted solution]

The only thing you can do is lock down the host completely and if someone log-on warn them with a big read picture on the desktop not to online and format of the LUN's. Also tell everybod there is a good change to win a 56 hours marathon work day if they mess with this host ;-D

You can't prevent a Administrator from doing admin tasks .

You can to some degree set the readonly policy using diskpart - BUT the attribute need to be reverted every time you restore using SAN transport. And a admin can remove the setting

Tech note for reference : 

VMware restores over SAN fails status code 185, but backups are working

http://www.symantec.com/docs/TECH172276

[Marianne]

Having Administrator logon comes with certain responsibilities - if you do not have written policies and procedures in your organization with strict change control policies in place, there is nothing from NBU or OS point of view that will prevent an Administrator from doing something really stupid....

I guess there are risks everywhere in life - set up rules so that everyone knows what is expected (or NOT expected) of them.