Veeam Zip vs. Hyper-V VM with snapshots.

[tim5700]

I inherited an environment with a Hyper-V 2008 R2 host with no backups. The plan is to move them to VMware and Veeam. While looking at the Hyper-V environment, the mission critical VM has a snapshot taken in 2010. I installed Veeam Free and have performed VeeamZips of the VM. I got an alert that one of the drives is nearly full. I need to expand the hard drive.

I can't expand the drive since it has a snapshot. But to delete/merge the snapshot will take a very long time (2+ year old snapshot). My proposed plan of action:

1. Power off the VM and take a Veeam Zip.
2. Restore the VM to an alternate location.
3. Grow the drive in Hyper-V followed by expanding it in Windows.

Question is, does VeeamZip retain snapshots during the backup process?

Is there any thing I am missing on this?

[Gostev]

Hello, your plan looks good to me. VeeamZIP will backup the current (latest) VM state, which is exactly what you want. VeeamZIP will not touch your existing VM snapshots. Good luck!

[zerodmg]

Hi i am in the situation that i have a machine with snapshots in a disk drive without free space to delete the snapshots , i could use veam zip to backup it or the lack of free space in the hyper-v machine could affect the backup?

[Vitaliy S.]

Hi Martin,

How much free space do you have on the disk? During VeeamZIP Veeam backup server triggers a VSS snapshot of the necessary volume, so you should have enough space for this operation.

Thanks!

[yizhar]

Hi.

> I can't expand the drive since it has a snapshot. But to delete/merge the snapshot will take a very long time (2+ year old snapshot).
Merge will take long time indeed, however it depends on the size of the AVHD file(s) and not the age- over time the same blocks in the AVHD are overwritten so it shouldn't matter how old it is - just the size.
You will need free disk space however - whether for MERGE or other actions such as RESTORE.

In anycase, for the safety I suggest taking also an in guest backup (using windows server backup for example), in addition to what you already have with VeeamZip.
I suggest this before any further action, keeping the backup on different host/media (could be a PC with shared folder - for this onetime backup).

Yizhar