I have a Windows server vm with a 1.5TB virtual disk under VMware ESXi. Disk is getting way too large. I am looking to move it off of the ESXi onto a TrueNas share. I am experimenting with “best” way, either an iscsi share attached to the Windows Server vm (so it appears to users as nothing changed) or as am SMB share and changing the Group Policy Drive map to map to it instead. I use Veeam to backup the Windows vm. Works fantastic. If I move that large disk to a Nas, what is the best way to back it up? While attached to the VM, Veeam does not see it, as it is backing up the .vmdk files at that level. If I use the SMB share method, then I can create a Veeam job to backup that share. If I use the iscsi method, I do not know how to back it up? Yes, I have played with the TrueNas snapshots but I can only restore the entire snapshot. With 1.5TB of files, that will never work. I need a solution like Veeam where I can click restore, see the entire drive/folder tree and drill down to the file/folder that needs to be restored, along with selecting what day/version I want to pull back. Rsync is another option but it requires some command line work and no versioning. If I understand correctly it just creates a carbon copy (showing my age) of the current data.
I have a 20TB Synology Nas that the Veeam backups used to go to. They now go to TrueNas nfs share and a copy to the Synology with an offsite copy to Wasabi immutable.
TrueNas has a cloud backup which I will start using soon to go directly to Wasabi (tested and it works great). It would be nice to have an onsite copy for speed in restores otherwise that would be my total solution I think.
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Why not leave it as a VMDK but as either an iSCSI volume on TrueNAS or placed on an NFS share on TrueNAS? The preferred methods for VMware in my experience.
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The best way to backup anything on TrueNAS is ZFS snapshots and replication.
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