Can Veeam back up VM WITH snapshots?

[pufferdude]

Today I accidentally deleted all snapshots on the wrong VM and lost a bunch of restore points I wanted to keep. This was a VM I'm using to test a new application on so losing the old snaps isn't a big deal, but it made me think to ask: IS there a way to tell Veeam to back up a VM *with* its (vSphere) snapshots along for the ride, so I could have restored it from backup and gotten ALL of the disk bits back into their original location? That would be useful to me on a few VMs like this where doing a "restore full VM" would literally restore everything that was on the datastore for that VM (had it been backed up in the first place.)

Just curious!

[Vitaliy S.]

Hi Jim,

VM snapshots cannot be backed up via vSphere APIs, so you only back up the latest state of a VM. If you would like to do some test against some applications, then spinning up Veeam Data Lab might be a better approach over here. What you do here, basically, is spin up a copy of the production VM in the isolated infrastructure and then run any tests you want. Here is a bit more info on this.

On a side note, please also be aware that keeping open snapshots or running VMs in multiple snapshots is highly not recommended for production VMs due to potential performance problems and issues with snapshot commit operations.

Thanks!

[Antanas26]

Hey. Quick check if the situation is any different today. Does the current version support taking a Veeam backup of a VM snapshot (so that the snapshot can be removed but the backup is available)? Or, if not, are there any plans to implement this? Thanks.

[Vitaliy S.]

There are no changes in how backup of vSphere VMs works, so my previous reply is still valid. If you need to back up VM at the specific point of time, then probably you can revert to this snapshot and then run a quick backup option (or other) to preserve the state of the VM when the snapshot was taken. Thanks!