Monitoring and reporting for Veeam Data Platform
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citpaj
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Full Name: Paul Jenkins

WARNING - Garbage Files Report - DANGEROUS ANOMALY

Post by citpaj »

I recently noticed that in Veeam ONE if you have two managed servers (in Configuration > Servers) and those servers (whether vCenter or stand-alone ESXi host) share commons data-stores, that no matter how you set the scope of the Garbage Files report, the resultant report mistakenly reports valid files as garbage. For example, let's say that in ONE, we have a managed vCenter server called VCSERVER and a managed stand-alone host called SAHOST. Whether you set the scope of the report as "Virtual Infrastructure', VCSERVER, or SAHOST, the report will show many files as garbage, when they are not. For example, if you set the scope at SAHOST, Veeam checks the data-stores for all files that are connected to VM's managed on SAHOST, and it correctly identifies them, but it also finds a bunch of files that it doesn't know about ... the files belonging to VM's on VCSERVER, and it has know way of knowing they belong to VM's on that managed server. It subsequently identifies those as garbage, which is very dangerous. An admin could mistakenly delete those files incorrectly identified as garbage, potentially leaving the admin with some very broken VM's.

The problem is that Veeam has no way of knowing that files on shared data-stores belonging to servers outside of the current scope are required and not garbage.

I'd really like to see this problem addressed, as quickly as possible.

This was reported to Veeam Support in Case #00604751.
Shestakov
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Re: WARNING - Garbage Files Report - DANGEROUS ANOMALY

Post by Shestakov » 1 person likes this post

Hello Paul. Thank you for the feedback!

I see your concern; but, it`s not typical to have 2 vCenters sharing one datastore. Could you explain why you decided to go for such type of configuration?
citpaj wrote:The problem is that Veeam has no way of knowing that files on shared data-stores belonging to servers outside of the current scope are required and not garbage.
The reason why Garbage Files Report shows more files than you expected as garbage is in report`s logic. The report shows an overview of storage consumed by all files that do not belong to VMs registered in VI inventory. For instance it helps to find VMs which were removed from inventory, but not deleted from datastore.

In your case, if you choose one of VCs in the scope, Veeam One will report all not related to the VC files as garbage, including VMs of the second VC and vice versa.
If you choose all VI, which contains 2 VCs sharing same datastore, Veeam One will first check all datastores(one in your case) of the first VC for garbage files, then all datastores(same one in your case) for garbage files.

For cases where single datastore is not shared by several VCs, the Garbage Report doesn`t have that kind of problem.
So once again, let me ask why have you decided to use one datastore by 2 VCs? You can split it into 2 parts, and avoid the issue.

Thank you.
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