Error consolidating snapshots: The available Memory resources in the parent resource pool are insufficient for the operation.

[Netevangelist]

I was hoping to garner some assistance with this. I have a virtual Exchange server whose mailstores are located on a couple of different SAN volumes. This is because the company, which I just joined, was having severe storage issues and the server configuration was not set up properly. So far, things have been going pretty well. The company has a couple of different backup solutions, including BackupExec and Veeam. I hope to eventually replace these multiple solutions with a really cool cloud-based one from Barracuda, but that's out of bounds for this post. Yesterday, I started receiving a message on the Exchange VM that I needed to perform a disk consolidation. Since Veeam handles the snapshots and none were listed in the VM's snapshot manager, I am relatively certain that they existed because of Veeam. I nonetheless went to do a snapshot consolidation and received the error:

The available Memory resources in the parent resource pool are insufficient for the operation. I am hoping someone could provide me with further insight to this error and its cause, as well as a resolution. I've migrated as many VMs off of the host as possible, and I'm left with 20% CPU utilization and 47% memory utilization.

Thanks in advance.

[MattWhelan]

Hi Netevangelist,

I am suffering the same problem, I had a failed Veeam backup which left lots of snapshots hanging around but when I try to consolidate the disk I get the same error message as you have described.

The server running this VM Windows guest is ESXi 5.1 and has lots of RAM (384GB) so I'm confused as to how it is running out of memory.

Did you ever manage to resolve it? What was the outcome?

If you have any info to share I would be very grateful.

Thanks in advance.

[vMariaL]

Hi Netevangelist, sorry you're having this issue. Veeam is not involved in performing snapshot cleanup, this process is handled solely by the ESXi host. Did you contact VMware Support?

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Veeam Community Manager

[MattWhelan]

Hi vMariaL

I appreciate that the Veeam software will not be involved in the cleanup process, that it is a ESXi host function, but the snapshots seem to be left around as orphans if a Veeam backup fails - in this case my repository ran out of space before the backup finished and left lots of snapshot delta files all over the datastores.

I have not found an answer to the problem "The available Memory resources in the parent resource pool are insufficient for the operation."

The only way I can consolidate the disks on VMWare is by powering down the guest machine and performing the consolidate. It seems to be working but does take a long long time to consolidate disks, 36 hours and counting so far....

Maybe the Veeam software could warn users that there are outstanding snapshots if delta disks exist before the backup process runs?

Thanks for your input.

Best regards

Matt

[ch1ta]

As far as I know, these temporary snapshots, if not removed at the end of the job, should be automatically removed during its next run, before backup.

However, I’m wondering what product version you’re running. I’ve heard previously about issues with “orphaned” snapshots in version 7 in environments where the vCenter is added to Veeam B&R console both as a Windows server and as the part of vCenter. But, this issues should have been fixed in patch#1:

http://forums.veeam.com/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=18243

Maybe the Veeam software could warn users that there are outstanding snapshots if delta disks exist before the backup process runs?

It might be worth deploying VeeamOne that does provide you with up-to-date information regarding your Virtual Infrastructure, including information regarding obsolete snapshot presence.

Thanks.