Veeam for AHV - Inability to restore and backup simultaneously in a chain (different RPs)

[HYF_JE]

Case 07248439. Opening up this thread on the advice of the support rep.

VBR 12.1.0.2131
AHV Plug-In 12.5.1.8

This will be a weird one, hopefully not one most admins will face. Maybe I have something fundamentally wrong here and this is working as designed.

I have a relatively new backup job/chain - a single VMware ESXi VM. I had successfully taken one full backup of that VM. I manually started the job again to get a fresh incremental RP (mostly to get an idea on how much data the VM churns).

While that incremental was running (which I expected take a while) I then attempted to start a restore of the VM to a Nutanix AHV cluster, using the restore point based on the full backup. What I found was that this failed. When trying to do an entire VM restore to AHV, I got this error immediately, the job never actually kicked off:

Code: Select all

Failed to start restoring virtual machine. Failed to execute restoreVM - Object reference not set to an instance of an object.

Failed to execute restoreVM - Object reference not set to an instance of an object.

I also tried doing an instant VM restore, and that error text complained about the .vib being locked. That didn't make sense to me, as I didn't ask for the restore of the VM from the in-progress incremental backup. I selected the full backup's restore point.

Code: Select all

Error Failed to start instant recovery session: Failed to publish disks. Failed to publish REDACTED Error: Failed to lock backup files
Item [REDACTED.vib] is locked by running session REDACTED [Backup]

Without doing a lot of research on my own, I'm guessing there's a limitation (unique to restores to AHV??) where you cannot restore from a chain when that chain is being used as part of a backup job to add an incremental.

This isn't a particular issue in our environment as our RPOs are pretty lenient but I could see this being problematic for customers who have aggressive/frequent RPOs. Here I'm thinking of a situation where an administrator wants to test a VM restore but doesn't want to disable the backup job in order to complete that restore.

Also to note it - while drafting this post, I took the same restore point in the chain (while the fresh incremental was running) and started a restore to a different VMware cluster and that seems to be working/in progress without error. I think that adds to the possibility of this being a limitation or bug.

[ronnmartin61]

Definitely a corner case but we will take a look...

[HYF_JE]

Quickly updating this thread:

I'm facing other issues with restores of VMware VMs to Nutanix AHV that I won't go into all the details on. The original issue I reported (inability to restore from a chain while the chain is being used for an active backup) may be a red herring on my end.

That said, if anyone from R&D would be able to expand on the factors that would lead to the first codeblock/error regarding "Object reference not set to an instance of an object" that would be much appreciated as it's stumping myself and support.

[HYF_JE]

Veeam support rep asked me to upgrade the VBR to 12.1.1.56 to try to solve the issue I'm having with restoring a VMware VM to Nutanix AHV. It was unsuccessful in doing so.