VEEAM causes ReFS error because Exchange VM not supported?

[Greenbyte]

Hello
I administer a Hyper-v Windows 2016 Server with several VMs with Exchange 2016 and Server 2016 as DC.
These VMS are backed up by veeam 9.5 via powershell script (https://www.veeam.com/blog/de/veeam-bac ... shell.html ) In this script quiescence is enabled for the exchange 2016 VM and the DC server2016 VM but not for the sbs 2008 VM.
The VMS reside on a ReFS formatted virtual disk made by 4 disks. (2SSDS and 2 harddisks as tiered storage with storage layout as mirror)
The server and backup went fine about half a year.
Now the problem occurred, that the virtual disk went offline 5 times
get-virtualdisk shows healthy and get-physicaldisk shows healthy for every disk in the storage pool.
We got
error StorageSpaces-Driver eventID: 312 error on virtual disk "{043afeb2-e102-45f2-937c-df53b68c2289}" on writing in all copies.
And
Eventid 134 RefS The file system was unable to write metadata to the media backing volume E:. A write failed with status " "A device which does not exist was specified" ReFS will take the volume offline. It may be mounted again automatically.
and
warning 08.09.2017 00:09:37 Disk 51 An error was detected on device \Device\Harddisk6\DR6. during a paging operation.
This is the virtual volume, containing the VMs.

The time of the volume going offline is not closely related to the time of the veeam backup

I opened a microsoft support case.
The microsoft support stated that the problem comes from the the veeam backup
“possible cause :
Backup Veeam uses checkpoints for backing up of Exchange( which is not supported and which the REFS could detect as corruptions and invokes the drive D :\ to go offline.... )
Tech Lead’s statement :
When we meant checkpoints, we saw AVHDX Files – an unsupported way of doing backup of an Guest-installed Exchange. Only supported way – from within the Guest Server itself. “

I stopped defender and VM replication and veeam Backup and the problem vanished!

So veeam is not usable to backup exchange VMs? Does the quiescence not use production checkpoints?
Do you agree with the microsoft support?

Thank you very much for your help

Michael

[Andreas Neufert]

Hi Greenbyte,

thanks for adding this to the forum. Can you please help me to understand a bit the situation.
Is the problem that you use ReFS within a VM and can not backup your exchange server, or is the problem that the backups causing troubles on the Hyper-V hosts?

Regarding your questions about Exchange. I wrote a whole article about all this. Please read through it: http://andyandthevms.com/exchange-dag-v ... plication/

[Andreas Neufert]

Oh and did you open a support case of Veeam to look into this? ... Did you had installed all required hotfixes from Windows and (potentially failover cluster) (not only Windows Update)?