best way to solve this? (pagefile on skipped vmdk)

[lohelle]

I cannot find a way to skip a vmdk in Veeam 4.x. I want to put the swapfile on a seperate disk on each VM and exclude this from the backup (less changes = smaller differentials)

I see from other posts that I can set the vmdk as independent, and it will be excluded from the backup. OK. that is fine, but will not that make the Windows Server crash on boot when I restore it? (it will not find the drive to put the swapfile). Creating a empty vmdk after restore will not work (no drive letter / file system).

Any advices? I could create the swapfile-vmdk thin and take a copy of that before I put the swapfile on it (but after a quickformat), because then the file would be very small.

This is not really a Veeam "problem", but I know there are some bright people using these forums..

[Vitaliy S.]

Hello Lars,

But why don't you use disk exclusion that is available at advanced job settings for that?
You may place the pagefile to the separate newly created disk and then exclude it from the job, as you do backups or replicas VMX configuration file will be automatically modified by Veeam, so in case of restore your VM boots successfully.
For detailed description please have a look at our Evaluator's Guide (page 12)

Thank you!

[lohelle]

I never saw that button! Thanks! Looked the wrong place.

[lohelle]

But.. When this VM is restored, the swap-partition will not be formatted. Windows will not like that. Or am I missing something?

[Vitaliy S.]

Lars,

Actually missing swap disk won't prevent Windows from booting. We've got many customers using that trick, and I haven't heard about any issues so far.

[Gostev]

Vitaly is correct, however if you are really concerned about possible issues, there is a cleaner solution to swap disk excludes. Should work well for backup too, you would just restore your VM backup on top of the existing VM, and all VM files would be overwritten - except swap disk from the original VM, which will remain intact.

[lohelle]

Thank you for the answers.