Backing up a Replica

[B.F.]

Here is a quick layout.

VMWare v6U1
Site 1 ---VM Replicates---> Site 2
Both sites have good speedy MSA's attached to the ESXi hosts.

Incremental replication goes pretty quick at about 12min for a 2TB VM

I've been doing some experimenting with having a long term inexpensive storage solution. An 8TB USB drive is plugged into one of the ESXi hosts where the Veeam VM is hosted. I've setup a backup job of the _replica to the 8tb drive and noticed something. The backup jobs succeed but I see the following in the action list:

"CBT data is invalid, failing over to legacy incremental backup. No action is required, next job run should start using CBT again. If CBT data remains invalid, follow KB1113 to perform CBT reset. Usual cause is power loss. "

Is this because the _replica is not powered on during backup? If so, should I turn off CBT?

I am aware of the "Remote Replica from a Backup" solution. However, since the long term storage I'm trying is a USB 2.0 device, I don't think this is a time reducing solution. Doing the initial full backup from the _replica to the USB drive took 29hrs. Incrementals take almost 3hrs. And this isn't going through a WAN like our current replication job is doing. I am looking into possibly install a USB 3.1 card since the drive is 3.0.

Thanks!

[nielsengelen]

If you keep getting this message it could be related to your ESXi build. This is a known issue for some vSphere 6 builds as there are some CBT bugs. The latest update (U2) resolves this though.

[foggy]

That said, CBT is indeed not available when backing up replica VMs.

[nunciate]

I replicate over 150 VMs to my DR site and I backup the replicas like you stated. I get the same message. It is normal.
I have been doing this for many months with no issue on Veeam 8. After upgrading to Veeam 9 I have stared to have job failures with parallel processing turned on.
I am working with support on that now.

[B.F.]

My mistake, we actually have VMWare v6 U2.

Anyways, I've turned off CBT as advised and I'm not getting the error.

Thanks all!