Can I Delete a Veeam Snapshot?

[davidshq]

I have a VM on ESXi that when I launch VMWare Infrastructure Client says, "(invalid)" and is italicized/grayed out.I cannot perform any operation on the vm (turn off, on, etc.) - though it is still running (even though the client reports that it is not, we can still access and manipulate the vm fine). Anyways, I believe the issue may be that Veeam failed in the midst of a backup. When I look at the snapshots for this vm it states, "VEEAM BACKUP TEMPORARY SNAPSHOT". Can I delete this snapshot? Will this likely resolve the issue?
Dave.

[Gostev]

Dave, if backup is not running for this VM, then you can remove this snapshot at any time using VMware Infrastructure Client. I am not sure if this would resolve your issue though. But it worths trying!

If Veeam Backup fails in the midst of backup, all what happens is it just stops pulling the VMDK data over, so it should not really have any affect on the VM (read-only operation). The only issue is that snapshot remains in place (but it will be automatically removed during the next backup cycle anyway).

[davidshq]

This is what I ended up using to fix it:http://communities.vmware.com/thread/67657. From what I read up on snapshots, deleting the snapshot would have caused me to lose any data from the time the snapshot was taken till now...since its the snapshot that receives new data written to it.
Dave.

[Gostev]

Dave, this is exactly why I said that you need to use VMware Infrastructure Client to remove snapshot (instead of deleting snapshot files). Removing snapshot with VIC commits all the data from snapshot back to VMDK files. This way, you do not loose any data.

However, if you simply delete snapshot files with some file manager like FastSCP, you will loose all the data since the time when snapshot was created.

[davidshq]

Gostev - Thanks for the clarification. I was not aware that performing this through the client would merge the changes rather than simply deleting them. Thanks!
Dave.

[Gostev]

Yep, glad to help Dave. This is exactly how we are able to provide you with hot backups in Veeam Backup. We create snapshot, copy static VMDK files while all changes are getting applied into the snapshot file, and then - when backup completes - we remove the snapshot to commit all changes happened during the time of backup back to VMDK files.

[davidshq]

Piggy-backing on this question. When we enable VMWare Tools based quiescence and/or Microsoft VSS integration - does this mean that Veeam does not create snapshots in these instances?
Dave.

[Gostev]

Veeam always creates snaphots during backup, this above is just about different VM quiescing technologies used during snapshot creation.

[rrabik]

Hi Gostev,
I am currently testing Veeam 4.1 will probably be your potential customer.
While testing couple of the backups froze. I disabled the jobs but couldn't stop it. It still had the green arrow. Even ending the process didn't help so had to restart the server to delete the replication job. Now I noticed that Veeam created a snapshot and wasn't removed. When I look at the snapshot manager in vsphere client I can see a snap shot named "VEEAM BACKUP TEMPORARY SNAPSHOT". After reading your fourth post from top, I understand that if I delete the "VEEAM BACKUP TEMPORARY SNAPSHOT" from vsphere client all data from that point onwards will be committed from snapshot to vmdk file and snapshot will be removed. Could you please reconfirm that this applies to Veeam 4.1 version as well and that I can go adhead and delete the snapshot. Thank you. Rabi

[Gostev]

Hello Rabi, thank you for reusing the existing thread.

Sure, that is correct. This is in no way specific to Veeam, it is regular VMware snapshot (just automatically created). You can as well leave it, and then the next Veeam Backup job run will take care of it automatically.

[rowdy]

Before we used Veeam, I also used to use DriveSnapShot (www.drivesnapshot.de). It is a completely different program than VeeAm so I'm sure VeeAm won't mind me posting the link
Drivesnapshot is more of a utility than a full-fledged backup suite like VeeAm is.

Anyway, what you can do if you ever have a situation like this:
-Download the trial version (only an EXE)
-Copy this into your (Windows) (running) VM
-Use it to make an image backup to a network share. The program uses VSS so it's compatible with almost every application
-Try what you want with the VM

If you end up destroying it, I have a home-made ISO file which contains Windows PE with SnapShot and VMWare SCSI drivers and NIC drivers. So, you can create another VM and boot it with the ISO and then use drivesnapshot to restore the backup. I even have detailled (home-made) instructions on all this (in Dutch of course).
If you need these files (the ISO and the DOC) let me know.

This is really useful if you have some kind of stuck VM that you can't do anything with, including backing it up with VeeAm and you just want to save the most recent state for if something goes wrong.

[Gostev]

I prefer to use VMware Converter for this kind of tasks. VMware support also always recommends it as well in situations suchs as with dozens undeletable snapshots on the VM, or when datastore is overfilled with snapshot data making snapshot management impossible.