Volume Groups’ usage for backup targets (Windows Server)
As you already know Nutanix provides block storage services in your clusters which are called Volume Groups. This provides SAN like capabilities by leveraging the existing hyper-converged infrastructure. Additionally, volume groups support SCSI unmap commands natively without having to turn on any additional setting as of AOS 4.7 in order to reclaim space from deleted blocks, more on that in the Nutanix Bible in the “Volumes (Block services)” section. However, there are certain caveats when using volume groups as backup targets so you must architect your backup solution wisely as you may have to consider losing some benefits in order to gain others.In this example, I will focus on Veeam’s feature of Fast clone, which you can read more about Veeam’s documentation here. However, this could apply to any backup solution that leverages underlying features from the file system to provide storage savings. In essence, this solution leverages the block cloning feature from ReFS in Windows whi
