Worst Case , VMs Storage out of Space , Full of Snapshots from Veeam Backup.

[Sailer9781]

Hello ,

We have two ESX Hosts with the Version 4.0.0 Build 261974

On the ESX2 Host is the Problem VM positioned.

The VM used the Storages VMFS03 and VMFS04.

The very important VM which Hosts an SQL 2008 Server cant start because the Storage ( VMFS04 ) on which the VMs Files and vmdk Files are stored is running out of space . The VM used two Storages , the Storage VMFS04 for the first 5 Harddisks and the Config Files, and the Storage  VMFS03 only for the 6th Harddisk from the VM which is 400 GB big . This Harddisk can every time delete because they don’t host necessary Data.There are many of snapshots and aditional vmdk files with ..0000001.vmdk . on the VMFS04 Strorage.

At the Moment i see in the VMs Settings that the Virtual Disk use the ...0000001.vmdk files and not the originals . The last VM Backup was on 5.30 on Sunday Morning. Today at 12.00 am the VM shot down. Now i have the original vmdk's from Sunday and the ..000001.vmdks from today and therefore the Storage VMFS04 is running out of space.

For the Backup we use Veeam Backup and Replication .

Veeam Backup and Replication shows on the last Backup at Sunday the following warning :

10 of 10 files processed

Total VM size: 835,00 GB

Processed size: 835,00 GB

Processing rate: 38 MB/s

Backup mode: NBD with changed block tracking Start time: 26.03.2011 23:19:14 End time: 27.03.2011 05:30:34

Duration: 6:11:20

Removing snapshot

RemoveSnapshot failed, snapshotRef "snapshot-631", timeout "3600000"

Die virtuelle Festplatte ist entweder beschädigt oder weist ein nicht unterstütztes Format auf.

Veeam Backup will attempt to remove snapshot during the next job cycle, but you may consider removing snapshot manually.

Possible causes for snapshot removal failure:

- Network connectivity issue, or vCenter Server is too busy to serve the request

- ESX host was unable to process snapshot removal request in a timely manner

- Snapshot was already removed by another application

What is the correct way for 1. reduce the space on the Storage and 2. become the VM runnig ?

Thanks for Help .

Michael

[gaspipe]

Have you tried commiting the snapshots manually?

[bulletprooffool]

The majority of the disk space used is not actually from the snapshots.

given the size of your drives being backed up, it is possible that you simply have too much data to backup - given how little free space you have. So what happens (this is a guess) is that the backup software starts creating the snapshots etc that it needs, but runs out of space before backing up the data - thus meaning it is unable to release the snapshots, due to insufficient disk space.

Get hold of Veeam - their support is pretty good - and if you have purchased the product, I am sure they'll help you with this in no time at all.