Deletion of retired VMs

[scottf99]

Hi I have found either an anomaly or a mis-configuration

I backup many VMs to primary storage retention of 60 days. All good here.
It then runs an immediate/mirror Backup Copy Job to secondary storage with 7 day retention
The secondary storage is a SOBR with an AWS Capacity Tier set to 7 days immutable and "Copy backups to object storage as soon as they are created"
The BCJ is configured to "Remove deleted items data after 30 days".

When a VM is retired it is removed from the Primary Job and as the Primary job is set to "Remove deleted items data after 14 days" the VM is eventually removed from the backup

What is not happening is the remove of the VM from Backup Copy and AWS. When I try to delete the VM from the Backup Copy it fails as it is marked Immutable. If I try a few weeks later it still fails and the Immutable period is moved out. It looks like the Immutable period is reset on ALL VMs in the BCJ whenever it is run so old VMs never get removed.

Cheers
Scott

[Gostev]

Hello! Do you have per-VM backup files option enabled on the scale-out backup repository? Thanks!

[scottf99]

Hi Gostev. Yes "Use per-VM backup files" is ticked on the Performance Tier Advanced settings. It is NOT ticked on each individual extent though. The actual backup files on disk are per vm.

[Gostev]

OK, in that case we would want to investigate this closer. Please open a support case and share the log files capturing the time frame of the deletion failure "a few weeks later" after the immutability period expiration. It is critical that you wait at least 10 days on top of your immutability period before trying to perform the deletion, due to the costs-optimized immutability architecture we use. Thanks!

[scottf99]

Will do. One more possible variable. If someone had deleted the retired VM from the Primary backups as opposed to it be deleted by "Remove deleted items data after 14 days" do you think that would impact the deletion from the BCJ?

[Gostev]

No, as the copy is performed well before the deletion.