1 Physically connect the Unitrends Recovery-Series appliance to the SAN using an iSCSI or Fibre Channel cable.
2 Log in to the backup system and select Settings > Storage and Retention > Storage.
3 Click Protect VMs on a SAN.
4 Enter a Storage Name, select a connection Type, and do one of the following:
• For iSCSI, proceed to To configure iSCSI storage.
• For FC, proceed to To configure Fibre Channel storage.
5 Once storage has been configured, run backups for the desired guest VMs as described in Executing VMware backups.
• vProtect detects the SAN storage configuration and uses the SAN-direct transport method during backup.
• Note that when restoring SAN-direct backups, VMware determines the most efficient transport method. Data is usually restored directly to the ESX server as the VMFS data store must be utilized.
Caution: If vProtect cannot directly access the SAN, the backup runs using the network connection, moving the guest’s data from the external SAN through the ESX file system to the backup system. If using network bandwidth is a problem during certain hours, schedule your backups accordingly.
6 To check whether SAN-direct was used for a given backup, see To verify the SAN-direct method is used.