Safe to delete snapshot from failed vdp backup

[heilage]

Hi

I had some backups fail last night and on 4 VMs I can see a snapshot that the VDP appliance made during the backup but was unable to remove automatically. (I assume)

Since these are some pretty critical servers I want to make sure that I can simply delete them using the snapshot manager without it impacting the running VMs in some way.

One of the reasons I want to be absolutely sure is that the view in the snapshot manager seems a bit odd. (See Attached images)

Shouldn't the snapshot be above the "You are here"? This it what it looks like on 3 of the VMs.

On the fourth it looks like this:

Any advice will be greatly appreciated.

[Paul11]

Can you do the backup again? The VDP than deletes the snapshot and you can be sure everything is done right. If it is not possible, than you must look at the VDP if the snap-shot is mounted. You can than remove the disk from the VDP, make a new snapshot on your VM and after that do a "delete all". This should also work without any dataloss.

[heilage]

Hi again.

Removing the disks from the VDP worked for the "fourth" server mentioned earlier and I'm now able to take backups of that one again.

The other three however still fails when attempting to back them up. Looking in the logs in \usr\local\avamarclient\var-proxy-N\jobname.vmimagew.log I see this message:

"Too many extra snapshot files (1) were found on this Windows VMs datastore. This can cause a problem for the backup or restore"

I tried to take new snapshots and do a "Delete all" again as you recommended but I still get the same error. (No shapshots are visible any more on the VMs in the VMWare client)

Any thoughts on how fix this as well?

Best regards

[snekkalapudi]

Try Snapshot->Consolidate on the VMs where backup is failing and then retry your backup.

[heilage]

I'm unable to do that because the option to consolidate is not chooseable. As far as the web client is concerned I don't have any snapshots of the VMs any more:

Best regards

[snekkalapudi]

See if this KB helps you by any chance - http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=203610...

[heilage]

Thanks you for your help.

Browsed the datastore and deleted the vmd-files from the old snapshot. Tried a new backup afterwards and it worked perfectly.

Thanks again.