Backup powered off vm without snapshot

[chad5k1]

Hi
I want to backup a power off vm but without taking a snapshot. I don't understand why it needs to snapshot when the vm is powered off.
I know I could use the copy function, but then I don't get the benefits of the compression and speed and so the it is too big and takes too long.
Any help?

[tsightler]

While I'm not sure, my guess would be the Veeam takes a snapshot anyway because there's no way it to know if you might power on the system while the backup is running, or to keep you from doing it. If you did power on the VM after the backup started, and there was no snapshot, the backup would be no good at all.

I'm curious why this is an issue for you. Taking a snapshot of a powered off VM, and then commiting the changes (which would commit nothing, assuming you didn't power on the VM while the backup was running) seems exactly the same as taking a backup without a snapshot.

[chad5k1]

Yeah, maybe I should have explained it.
Basically the vm will no longer snapshot for some reason. It has only just started doing this, but whilst I troubleshoot what the issue is I want to take backup to be on the safe side. If I just do a file copy the suggested finish time is over 6 hours later!! So that is not really an option, hence the desire to have the backup taken without a snapshot.

[tsightler]

Interesting problem. Good luck with it. Any chance it's a problem with the host rather than the VM itself. We had a strange problem where a couple of machines would not snapshot because they reported "another operation was already in progress" or something to that effect. In reality, nothing was going on. We eventually killed the "hostd" process and forced a host management agent restart and then things were working again. I know there's only a small chance you're having the same problem, but I thought I'd mention it anyway, just in case (we've actually had this happen twice since upgrading to vSphere 4.

[chad5k1]

Good suggestion, thanks, I'll see if I can vmotion to another server.
I'd still like some suggestions to my backup without snapshot problem if anyone has any.....?

[Gostev]

Tom is correct, backup without snapshot is not possible.

[tsightler]

Good suggestion, thanks, I'll see if I can vmotion to another server.
I'd still like some suggestions to my backup without snapshot problem if anyone has any.....?

If it's the same problem we had you won't be able to vMotion it either. vSphere would not allow any operations on the "stuck" VM's because it thought some operation was still pending even though the logs for the VM showed no pending operations. It was as if the host management process did not detect when the previous snapshot had completed it's commit. We attempted a normal restart of the management agent with the "service mgmt-vmware restart" command but it hung trying to stop the service. We then killed the "hostd" process with the kill -9 command and kill the stuck shell process that was attempting to stop the services and the service restarted as it should and everything went right back to normal.