Cannot Exclude Disk

[Gostev]

Next maintenance release should be out within a couple of weeks, but as Vitaly already stated it does not include the fix for the UI glitch discussed in this topic.

[antspants77]

Just adding my voice to this thread.
We don't publish roadmaps, is not ver good when we have Enterprise Customers without protection.
We bought this product for our Customers, because we said it was the best, now we say "oh sorry, you're not protected and the company we said was so awesome can't tell us when it will be fixed"
What do you recommend in the meantime? Hope and prey or use Windows backup?

[Gostev]

Hi Tony, I don't understand what you are saying here. How exactly this UI glitch "leaves your customers without protection"?

[antspants77]

I have looked back through the thread and as with other VMware backup solutions, the only way to exclude a disk from backup, is to make them independent in VMware.
I have now done this, so the question is now "what is the exclude option for if it is done through VMware?"
The only thing I can think of, is so that the restore doesn't have broken disks when it is finished.

[Vitaliy S.]

I have looked back through the thread and as with other VMware backup solutions, the only way to exclude a disk from backup, is to make them independent in VMware.

This is not quite right. When you make an independent disk you exclude those disks from snapshotting, thus meaning you exclude them from backups either.

However, it is not necessary to mark virtual disks as independent if you want to exclude them from backup jobs. Just use exclude functionality with Veeam and that's it. When you exclude those disks with Veeam, we edit VMX file so you could restore and start VM flawlessly, in other words you won't get any error message telling you that VM cannot be started due to a missing disk.

That said, the UI glitch that is being discussed here has nothing to do with actual disk exclusion at all...the only issue is that the estimation size engine doesn't take excluded disks into consideration while re-calculating the total VM size that is shown in the wizard for convenience.

Thank you!

[cag]

[merged]

I have a VM with 3 disks 90GB 80GB and 500GB. I wish to exclude the 500GB from the replication task. When I exclude this disk and click the recalculate but nothing changes. Reported size is still 670GB. Should this number change ?

Also I get the following in the status page.
One or more VM disks have incorrect changed block tracking configuration. I dont think anything is incorrect. This disk is not included for snapshot in VMWARE and I have excluded this in Veeam. Why the message. ?

[Alexey D.]

Hello Conrad,

Yes, that's a known UI glitch, please read through this topic for more info. On your second question, thanks for pointing this out. Sometimes this message can show up even if a disk is excluded, we will fix this too.

[Aztech]

We are having this same problem too. And it is extremely serious. We virtualized our main file and DHCP server this past weekend. Our VM server uses an iSCSI datastore 1 TB volume where our organization's user files are stored. We need to back up the operating system drive C:\, but exclude the 1 TB F:\ drive datastore. Veeam 5.0 is not allowing us to do the exclusion. So in effect we cannot backup this important VM server with this product. It works fine on smaller servers where we don't need to exclude a drive. This is obviously a serious bug in the product that needs to be fixed soon with a patch release.

[Vitaliy S.]

Steve, please look through this topic more carefully. This is just a UI glitch and it has no effect on actual disk exclusion mechanism.

[bib_ak]

Is this really annoying bug fixed?

[Vitaliy S.]

Currently there is no fix for this UI glitch.

[Gostev]

If you are talking about size calculator taking excludes into account, then no. Surprisingly, this appeared to be quite complex fix to implement (despite looking very simple).

[cby]

[merged]

Running B&R 5.0.2.230 and backing up a number of RHEL5 VMs

Most of our backup jobs specify disks to exclude, e.g. all swap disks and some non-production disks. I added another disk to one of these VMs as a staging area for migration work and marked it as an excluded disk. The new disk was created on a 2MB block size datastore. All existing disks in this particular job are on a 1MB block size datastore.

I am aware of the issues with mixing block sizes and how to overcome these, including avoiding a VM power off/up cycle. In this instance despite excluding the disk Veeam still produces the standard error:

Code: Select all

File <unspecified filename> is larger than the maximum size supported by datastore '<unspecified datastore>

This is because the snapshot occurs at the Vsphere level and incorporates all disks irrespective of the exclusion directive in Veeam. I can address this issue, probably by migrating everything to a 2MB datastore.

However, what is odd is that after amending the job and adding the new (excluded) disk the recalculated VM size includes the excluded disk. There is nothing different about this job -- all the others display a reduced VM size when excluding disks. I can't see how the mix of 1MB && 2MB block size datastores has anything to do with it.

Of course, until I get the job to run I can't comment if the resulting backup does actually include the excluded disk!

[enrw]

[merged]

Hello Forum,

in one of our Virtual Machines it isn't necessary to backup every disk. So we excluded two of them.
Strangly the size for this VM inside the replic-job-setup stays the same.

I was sure this would decrease the size - am I wrong?

Regards
martinelli

[kressirers]

[merged]

hello evereybody,

i'm a new community-forum-user. last week i bought the "veeam backup & replication" for vmware essentials kit. after some successful backups, i tried to exclude some disks of a VM. (Need just the system-partition, the rest is filelevel-backup).

Job Creation:
-> New Backup -> vCenter-selection -> VM-selection -> Exclusions.. -> Disks -> uncheck Disk which i don't need -> OK

The first irritating thing is the backup-size. "Recalculate" doesn't work either. After the job finished, i have a backup with all partitions. It seems like the program ignores the settings.

vCenter and ESXi Version: 5.0.0
Backup & Replication Version: 6.0.0.153

Thank you for helping,

Stefan

[VTBackup]

[merged]

All,
I am trying to select the Mapped RAW LUN in the backup selection. The locaiton I believe where this should be selected is under Disks to Process on the Disks tab of Exclusions. I choose all the corresponding selected disks (SCSI 0:0 - 0:6) as these correspond to the RDM of my file server. When I recalculate, Total Size adds up to only the C drive of the file server. The RDM's are Virtual and Independent is not selected.

Any suggestions?

[stevew05]

NOT FIXED IN VERSION 6 PATCH 3 EITHER!!!!

[tfloor]

Indeed i also still see this issue. Wow its à very old issue that still exist. Is It difficul or a very very low priority case

[foggy]

Not easy to fix AND not the highest priority. But still on the list.

[tfloor]

"low priority list" > /dev/null

[tfloor]

[merged]

Hello,

I've Veeam B&R 6.1 Using Vmware vsphere 4.1 / 5

I've changed the job's to select virtual machines to backup based on the "VMs and Templates" Folder hierarchy
So it looks likes this:

> Cluster
>> Windows
>>> 2003
>>> 2008
>> Linux
>>> OES
>>> SLES 11

Before i was selecting vm's manual. I want to use this one to not forget any vm to backup based on the folder structure.
But the problem is, that i need to exclude a disk from a Windows > 2008 VM.

So i go to exclusions and select the "VM's and Templates" and then i only see the folder "2008" i need to add the VM that needs exclusions manually to that list ????
I can do that and add the vm manually so that i ended with 1 folder "2008" and 1 seperate VM in the list.
But it doesn't matter how much vm's i add for disk exclusion, the size (recalculate) is still the same.

Is this a non-working method?

Regards,

Tristan.

[Vitaliy S.]

Yes, if you want to exclude disk for specific VM you should add it manually to that list. As to the disk exclusion functionality, then it does work, just recalculation doesn't show the correct value.

[jamessa]

It is really a shame this has not been resolved after many releases. Bugs should not hang around this long.

[famantia]

Hello,

I have this kind of problem,

my infrastructure composed by:

3 host with vsphere 4.1 (production cluster)
2 host with wsphere 4.1 (backup cluster)

I'm trying to create a replica of a windows machine with 4 disk, but i want to replicate only the system disk, so i went in the exclusion menu of the task and selected only the system disk.... But surprise when recalculate the space, veeam doesn't care about my settings.
Do you have any idea about this problem?

Sorry for my English, i hope that this message can be comprensible.
best regards

[tomas.olsen]

When creating veeam backup jobs, veeam calculates the total size of the backup job.
If you exclude one disk of a virtual machine in the backup job, recalculation does not change the total size of backup job. nothing major, just wanted to make you aware of it.

This has been testet on the latest version on the latest patch, 128.

[ZachW]

We are actually aware of this and was actually just touched on by another user in another thread. Either way thanks for bringing this up!