Snapshot Hunter for Hyper-V

[benthomas]

As per this discussion a couple of months ago on Reddit, we find that Veeam B&R doesn't always remove its snapshots
https://www.reddit.com/r/Veeam/comments ... v/fh9pmpg/

I've got a case of this at the moment, where there is a 'recovery' checkpoint left on a VM from over a week ago. The VM gets backed up daily and hasn't had any failures, but this snapshot was left behind.

Code: Select all

PS C:\WINDOWS\system32> Get-VM -ComputerName VMHOST01 -Name VM01 | Get-VMSnapshot

VMName   Name                                SnapshotType CreationTime          ParentSnapshotName
------   ----                                ------------ ------------          ------------------
VM01     VM01 - (5/13/2020 - 6:09:16 PM)     Recovery     13/05/2020 6:09:27 PM

It would be nice to have Veeam check on the next backup for any leftover snapshots as it does in vSphere.

[Vitaliy S.]

Hi Ben,

As an alternative solution to this, I would recommend taking a look at Veeam ONE which can alert you if there is an "old" or "large" snapshot in the VM configuration. See our predefined alarms in Veeam ONE for VMs > Microsoft Hyper-V Alarms

Thanks!

[benthomas]

Hey Vitaliy,

It would be preferred to have B&r correctly clean up its own snapshots like it does for VMware rather than deploy a second product just to monitor it.

If it's done for VMware workloads, why not do it for Hyper-v as well? I pay the same for the product, it'd be nice to get what I'd consider basic functionality regardless of the hypervisor I use.

[Vitaliy S.]

I do not object to you here, just proposed a workaround since there is no other option right now to address your issue. Thanks!

[benthomas]

Still hope this can be added to a backlog/roadmap though so that Veeam cleans up after itself as it does on VMware.

[PetrM]

Hi Ben,

The Snapshot Hunter addresses the specific issue related to the failed consolidation process, in most cases this issue occurs due to file locks.
The consolidation algorithm consists of 3 VMware methods and sequential execution of all methods usually allows us to get rid of phantom snapshots.

In case of HyperV, Veeam requests Microsoft VSS to perform cleanup after job completion and we don't know the cause of the failed cleanup operation:
we cannot be sure that the second attempt to remove a checkpoint will be successful and will not provoke negative side effects.

At first, we should clarify what exactly causes these leftover snapshots to appear otherwise we will not be able to use the same approach as we applied for VMware.
I'd like to say that the idea is quite interesting but we just need to get more information before we can start to implement it.

Thanks!