Hyper-V 2016 Production Snapshots

[solv]

Hi,
Reading through documentation I'm still a little confused as to whether we should have production snapshots enabled or not for Veeam to function properly.
Snapshots are on by default, and we have noticed a VM that has some snapshots that we don't remember manually triggering, so I assume they are somehow orphaned from Veeam?
They are causing issues with space running low - so we have turned off snapshots, and Veeam is still reporting a successful backup - so I assume they aren't needed but I wanted to check.

Wouldn't mind a bit of clarification as to how the Veeam backups work in the latest version of Hyper-V. Does Veeam use Hyper-V's built in snapshot technology, or does it just directly call the Guest VM's to use VSS and handle things itself independent of the hypervisor?

Thanks in advance

[Mike Resseler]

Hey Solv,

I am assuming you are running Hyper-V 2016? In that case, if all of your VMs are on the correct VM hardware level (and your cluster also if you are running in a cluster) then Veeam will use the native way of protecting Hyper-V VMs (by calling specific API's that are built for this by MFST itself). This requires production snapshots. Through those production snapshots we also use VSS inside the guest to make sure the backup is consistent.

If you are seeing lingering snapshots, then it is best that you contact support. There are a few updates from MFST (if I am not mistaken) that solves this issue. There used to be an issue where Hyper-V couldn't clean up those. And we are using their native calls again to clean them up.

Please post the case ID here and afterwards the resolution or outcome after investigation of our engineers

Thanks
Mike