Snapshots take forever to delete.

[nlaurino]

We have to VM's that make up the DAG servers in our Exchange environment and use VEEAM B&R v.7.02 to backup and replicate our VM's.

Although the backups for these two machines do not take long at all, we are having problems in that the snapshots are taking many hours (as long as 8.5 hours) to delete.

These two servers hold the off-line copies of our mailbox databases. It is causing issues with our backup window in that they are not completing in a timely manner.

This has just started recently in the last week. No changes on the VM's or VEEAM during that period. VM size has also been stable.

We are running vCenter 5.1.

[a_p_]

Did you take a look at the performance counters to see whether there's a high latency on storage reds/writes? Do you see errors in the vmkernel log which may be related to this? What type of storage do you use?

I assume you are using shared storage. However, if you are using local storage make sure the write-back cache is active (it may fall back to write-through in case of a cache battery failure).

André

[Cyberfed27]

We have had the same issues randomly on some of our VM's. Sometimes triggered by Veeam other times just when manually deleting a snapshot in vCenter. The longest removal was about 3 hours. The VM itself was not particularly large in size.

We haven't found a solution but it happens so infrequently that its more than a minor annoyance than anything else.

We have some I/O latency issues on our SAN and we are pretty sure that's part of the issue.

[Cyberfed27]

Also, if you have old snapshots on the VM that can contribute to the issues. Remove any and all snapshots if possible prior to running Veeam backups.

[COS]

what's the backing of your storage? SATA? SAS? SCSI?

Keeping VMware Snapshots for a long time is not good practice. Snapshot can grow indefinitely and the larger the snapshot delta, the longer it takes to delete which is exponentiated by slower spindles.