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gfellerj12
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Major Snapshot trouble!

Okay,

So for some reason in one of my very important VM's I've ended up with 5-9 snapshots on every disk and I cannot get rid of them.  I think Veeam is to blame for this but I don't know what to do to consolidate.  I've tried createing a new and doing a delete all and also done it with quiesce guest file system.  All this does is add yet another snapshot and point the disks to that corresponding delta file!  Help

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a_p_
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This looks like a stale process still locking one of the virtual disk files. Depending on the environment you run (e.g. no Auto Start/Stop configured for the VMs), restarting the services can help (http://kb.vmware.com/kb/1003490).

André

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Troy_Clavell
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can you right click on the VMs in question and go to snapshot--consolidate?

If the snapshot chain is long and big, you may have some pauses in the OS, so it may be quicker to do it while the VMs are powered off.

gfellerj12
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When I do that it says it cannot consolidate because something has "a lock on the file"

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a_p_
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This looks like a stale process still locking one of the virtual disk files. Depending on the environment you run (e.g. no Auto Start/Stop configured for the VMs), restarting the services can help (http://kb.vmware.com/kb/1003490).

André

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gfellerj12
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I restarted and the consolidate seems to be running!  Will this take care of the snapshots?  Or will I need to consolidate and then create a new snapshot and do a delete all?

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Troy_Clavell
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consolidate will take care of all.

gfellerj12
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That worked!  Thank you thank you!  Any thoughts on why this keeps happening?  Maybe I need to get Veeam involved

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Troy_Clavell
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this is a fairly common problem with any backup software.  We use PHD and from time to time this happens in our environment as well.

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gfellerj12
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So really nothing to worry about as long as I keep an eye on the delta files in the datastore and if they build up just consolidate them?  I get wary when I see a ton of snapshots and worry about data corruption or system failure but I guess vmware has it covered...

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Troy_Clavell
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yeah.. you have to keep an eye on the files.  We're actually working with VMware Support so when the alert "consolidate VM" shows up we can somehow be alerted via smtp for it.  For now that seems to be a hidden api, but we did file a feature request.

there are good things and bad things about VMware backups, long snapshot chains are one of the bad things.

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gfellerj12
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A company I just inherited has a vmware setup and they virtualized their file server which I don't see the meaning of in the first place and it is about 2 TB.  Using Veeam backup and backing up the entire VM takes forever and is unreliable at times.  Maybe I should just do some sort of data duplication backup on that particular VM instead of an entire VM backup...

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a_p_
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Glad to hear you were able to resolve the issue.

I saw another discussion today. Not the exact same issue but maybe related (Re: Consolidate Helper -0 snapshot issues)

André

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ch1ta
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Using Veeam backup and backing up the entire VM takes forever and is unreliable at times.

Can you elaborate on what do you mean by “unreliable”, we have been using the aforesaid solution since the version 5 and everything tends to have worked properly. Therefore, I’m wondering what particular issues you experience with Veeam.

As to the time it takes Veeam to finish the back job, it might be worth answering few questions:

What are the bottleneck statistics for this job? What does your infrastructure look like? What backup method are you using? What proxy mode is being used? Is CBT enabled and utilized during backup runs or not?

Additionally, have you had a chance to contact Veeam with that issue via Veeam Community Forum, for instance:


http://forums.veeam.com/index.php

If not, I strongly recommend you doing it, since this forum seems to be very supportive. Cheers.

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