Veeam snapshots causing over allocation alerts on datastores

[link12]

Hello

We are using Veeam 6.1 and vSphere 5.x. (We're new to Veeam)

What we've noticed is that during a backup some of our datastores shows over 100% of over allocated disk space. Once the snaps are committed it of course goes away. My question is, Is Veeam smart enough not to do any backups if the datastore that will "house" the snapshots associated the guest VM not have enough disk space? We don't want Veeam to take down our datastores if for some reason they don't have enough disk.

Thanks everyone.

[Gostev]

Is Veeam smart enough not to do any backups if the datastore that will "house" the snapshots associated the guest VM not have enough disk space?

Hello, yes Veeam is smart enough. We will not attempt to take VM snapshot if free space on datastore hosting snapshot file is less than 2 GB. Thanks!

[link12]

Thanks for the reply. So what happens if we have 3 GB free on the datastore and during the backup we have 2.5gb of delta's?

[Gostev]

Backup completes successfully, delta is committed to VMDK, and you are back to 3GB free.

[link12]

Okay, thanks for the education......this makes sense.

[BackDatAsciUp]

Link,

How are your jobs scheduled? Do you have all of your VMs on one datastore running concurrent veeam backups? Try spacing them out in 15 or 30 minute increments.

[link12]

I have our Exchange mailbox servers (1 DAG) in one backup job and our Hub CAS Servers in another backup job. If I backup one of the 4 mailbox servers alone with no other backup jobs running I lose connection to the other three during the commit process. Right now our backups are going over the network. Would LAN free help this?

[BackDatAsciUp]

What type of storage do you have and are you using Vmware, Hyper-V, etc.

[link12]

We are using Vmware vSphere 5.x with 3Par storage.

[Vitaliy S.]

Right now our backups are going over the network. Would LAN free help this?

Running your backup job in either SAN or HotAdd mode will improve the VM processing rate, which in turn will reduce the backup window and the snapshot size of your Exchange server. While this does not guarantee that you will not see any connection drops during snapshot commit process, this will definitely make the snapshot commit procedure a bit faster.

[link12]

Thanks for the suggestion, we'll give it a shot.

[link12]

Where exactly is that setting you are referring too, SAN or HotAdd? Within the backup job I see Storage | Storage Optimization. Is that the location you are referring too?

[Gostev]

Backup proxy settings.

[link12]

Ahh, I see it. Thanks

[link12]

Finally got through to VMware support and because we have a lot of VMDK's associated to a guest VM, this is causing snapshot delay's. According to Best Practices for Vmware and Exchange 2010 is large VMFS and cut into a bunch of small vmdks for db and logs. We're all doing LAN free backup so that's working now but still same issue. Ugh