Veeam Temporary snapshots not removed

[turnerr12]

Hi, we are having some problems with Veeam Temp snapshots not being removed after a backup job. The job failed (saying it cannot remove the snapshot) and the snapshot is being left behind and so not allowing another backup job to be kicked off. If I try to manually Delete All snapshots from VC it says "Operation failed since another task is in process". How do I get rid of the snapshots cleanly?

Any help much appreciated.

Enviro: ESX 3.5; 2 host cluster; Veeam 4.1; VC=Win2K3 SP2.

[Vitaliy S.]

Hello Ric,

Do you see this message while trying to delete the snapshot using Snapshot Manager? Was you previous job session successfull? It seems like VMware locked the snapshot for some reason that's why neither you using Snapshot Manager nor us are able to delete the snapshot, anyway please refer to our support team to troubleshoot this issue.

Thank you!

[turnerr12]

Hi

Yes we got that message when trying to delete from VC.
No we have not managed to get a successful backup of some of the machines as yet. We do have successful backups of a number of VM's but we are also seeing this snapshot error on a few.

Thanks
Ric

PS Here is the error in Veeam report:
Constructing rollback file name RemoveSnapshot failed, snapshotRef "snapshot-8520", timeout "3600000" Operation timed out.

[typoman]

I had this issue on a client's system. I wound up having to shut down the VM, run a command to identify the current active vmdk snap files (which I can't remember), then clone those snap files to a new vmdk. It brought all of the contents of the original base vmdk with it to the new clone. Then I told the VM to use the new vmdk's and turned it back on. I was then able to delete the obsolete vmdk's and snap files through the datastore browser. Everything was perfect after that and Veeam jobs ran great.

Here's the clone command I used. There were 2 vmdk's on the vm that each had 2 stuck snaps. I cloned them each to a new file. You can convert to thin disks at this point if you want by adding a switch to this command.

vmkfstools -v 3 -i Server-000002.vmdk -d NewFile1.vmdk
vmkfstools -v 3 -i Server_1-000002.vmdk -d NewFile2.vmdk

I shut down the VM and removed the 2 existing virtual disks. I added the 2 new disks I just made, being careful to make sure the first one I added was the boot disk.

[ceebee]

While cloning is the immediate resolution to a given problem it is not the most efficient way to get rid of a snapshot left behind by Veeam. I have the same exact issue and i am being told that the issues are environmental. What is your environment like - so that i can make some notes and see if this is the standard answer that is given out to all all customers.

[turnerr12]

Hi Chet

I think it might well be something wrong with our environ - (sorry to pee on your campfire! ) There are a number of issues and best practices that we have yet to overcome and I'm sure we have not got Veeam configured or running in the most efficient way yet. We've only been running it a month or so and are also making a number of changes to our ESX environ at the same time.
Cheers

[typoman]

Our issue initially started because we made changes to the environment. I think it was when we converted the VM's to thin disks. We didn't touch Veeam at the time, and it didn't like the changes. Snapshots got messed up that night. The cloning method was how VMWare support wanted to fix the snapshot issue. I then recreated the Veeam jobs and everything's been perfect since.