For Service Pack 11 and later, the Virtual Server Agent (VSA) provides support for streaming backups, IntelliSnap backups, and restores of virtual machines on VMware Virtual SAN (vSAN) datastores.
Support has been certified by VMware with vSAN.
vSAN storage provides a consolidated logical view of physical storage resources across a cluster that can be used by virtual machines.
The VSA proxy that you use for backups and restores must be able to access the ESXi hosts in the cluster that contribute resources to the vSAN datastore. To improve read rates and reduce traffic among nodes in the cluster, you can deploy one or more VSA proxies on Windows or Linux virtual machines on ESXi hosts in the cluster. Backups and restores use HotAdd or NBD transport. SAN transport mode is not supported.
For VMs that are part of a vSAN stretched cluster, VMware backups that use the HotAdd transport mode attempt to use a VSA proxy (also called an access node) that is part of the same fault domain as the source VM. This dispatch method is used when there is no access node available that runs on the same host as the source VM.
For more information about IntelliSnap support, see IntelliSnap Protection for VMs on VVol or VSAN Datastores.