Veeam storage volume madness

[mlottcpap]

We recently did a test of Veeam in our environment. I am familiar with Veeam but not so much with storage snapshots. After the test, with no scheduled backups setup, we ended up with 250+ new volumes named, e.g., VEEAM-ExportLUNSnap-28E485338B414DAD00015F22. This was on a Pure storage array. I know I will most likely have to delete them one by one but was curious whether anyone else had seen similar issues and/or knows of a way I can get Veeam to manage/delete them. Whatever it was apparently was running every hour for a week or more on 3 actual volumes.

[Andreas Neufert]

Hi, thanks for posting this.

It is a bit hard to guess what exactly happened by the feedback above, so please allow me to describe how the plug-in work.
If you add a storage, Veeam will create exports for the existing snapshots and mount them to a Veeam Proxy Server (potentially the Backup Server itself) to check if there are VMs on it.
Afterwards it will delete those exports. This process is scheduled. So my guess is that because of the Veeam Server can not scan nor delete the export, you face the situation.

Now the question is why this happened. Can you please open a support ticket at Veeam and let our Team check the logs.

My guess is that a) the account used for the storage has not the needed rights and b) no proxy can access the volumes.

There is as well an option to scope the storage integration and select only specific volumes. This potentially help if your run non VMware workloads on the storage to reduce overhead.
Thanks Andy

[mlottcpap]

Thanks - I can try to open a ticket but our trial license has expired. Hopefully, that does not get in the way of opening a ticket or obtaining logs. In the meantime, I had shut down the Veeam server as the count was increasing.

[Andreas Neufert]

You can get a new trial license from the website or from your sales representative.
At Support you can select Backup & Replication evaltuation version. Should work.

[Andreas Neufert]

When you exlude all volumes at the Storage wizard, then Veeam should not scan for additional volumes.

[mlottcpap]

I have opened a ticket for this. Also, when I brought the server back up to export logs, yet another copy of each volume was created.

[Andreas Neufert]

The rescan start after the Veeam service start. If you exclude the volumes it should stop Veeam to do this whic allows you and support to anaylse it.

Please share ticket number here so that we can have a look. (This is not a support forum).

[mlottcpap]

I am not sure what you mean by "this is not a support forum." But, anyway:

There was not much content on my ticket, only a virtually immediate reply that we are "impacted by a bug in the storage integration piece of the Veeam software" and will need to install Update4. I will need to clear the volumes myself but this should be prevented in the future.

It appears that we are running 9.5.0.711. I will try updating to verify that this stops.

[foggy]

Could you please share the case ID so we could get some details from the case notes? Thanks!

[mlottcpap]

Normally I would but there is honestly nothing more to tell from the case notes anyway than what I had already posted. Nothing was done and I had no other interaction with Veeam on this.

After upgrading to update4, this has stopped. However, I am also now running Community Edition until we actually purchase licenses. Everything up to now has been a test.

[mlottcpap]

Correction - after the upgrade the process continued. Next I decided to remove the storage array from Veeam. This process is actually removing the offending volumes. So weird.

[Andreas Neufert]

Can you please check (maybe manually) if the user used for Veeam to get access to the storage has volume delete rights on the storage. Otherwise we can not delete the Thin Cloned volumes that we use for scanning.

[Andreas Neufert]

And please share the support ID, so that we can have a look at the logs.

"This is not a support forum" => What I wanted to say was. No support engineers are monitoring this forum. This forum is run by Veeam product management with the participation of field Solutions Architects and System Engineers.

[foggy]

And we need the case ID also to check the "impacted by a bug in the storage integration piece of the Veeam software" statement, since I cannot recall any known issues like that for Pure Storage off the top of my head.