starting Virtual Machine on ESXi Host 6.5 standalone host fails

Question

I am having an issue with my iscsi-datastore. My Virtual Machines are making a backup on second HD connected to each Virtual machine.
This HDs are located on iscsi-datastore. In windows, Veeam does the backup of Virtual Machines to second harddisk => All working well.

But if for some reason the iscsi-datastore is offine (power failure/network), none of the Virtual machines wil boot, because the Virtual Machines won’t find second Hard drive that is located on the iscsi-datastore

It seem logic to me that this is happens, but Is there a way to/workaround to avoid this, so in case of a failure, the Virtual machine only looks to the first harddisk (is on local storage)an boots the VM on ? This system is a standalone Esxi 6.5 Host.

Answer 1

The point of using Veeam as a host-side backup solution is that the guest VMs do not (need to) participate in the backup process at all.

Your backup repository should be accessible only to the backup server with its credentials - this saves you from ransomware, gross user errors and such. Having each VM's backup repository (?) mounted on the VM exposes you to all kinds of avoidable problems.

If the backup repository is an iSCSI storage it's best to mount it on the backup server or a repository server only.

If you edit your question to provide more details to your environment I can expand this answer accordingly.