Changed Blocks and incremental replication size

[romanos]

Hi all,
I'm testing Backup&Replicator on ESX4 and I am not sucessfull with replication only changes which ocurr.
I perform replication on power down VM and after first (initial) replication the second (incremental) replication again replicated all VM size.
Where could be issue?? I check "Use changed block tracking data".
When I test it with competitor's product from Vizioncore their vReplicator works greatly.
I would like use more recovery points which vReplicator could not offer.
Thanks for your help, Roman.

[Vitaliy S.]

Hello Roman,

Could you please verify that you've met all the requirements for change block tracking feature: Change Block Tracking. Also do you see any error messages in the job session?

Thank you

[Gostev]

Roman - also, based on what did you conclude that the whole VM was replicated during the incremental pass? Session's log would definitely help here.

[romanos]

I don't know why, but now it works. Issue must be somewhere in VM. I test it on diferent VM and there it works correctly with Veeam and with Vizioncore too.
I would have another question. Is it possible to find the amount of data which has been replicated? I always see "Processed size" in size of VMDK file but if I change only 1GB only 1GB has been replicated. What is change is "Processing rate". If I change a little data the "Processing rate" is high if I change a lot of data "Processing rate" decrease. I would want know the amount of data.
Thanks, Roman.

[Vitaliy S.]

Roman,

You can do that by clicking Properties option at your Veeam Backup and Replication console on any of your jobs in the Backup section. This option contains information on compression and de-duplication ratios, available restore points for a particular backup, as well as date, data size and backup size.

[romanos]

Thanks, but this informations are listed only for backup job. I would need it for replication job too.

[Vitaliy S.]

Roman,

If you want to trace the same for replicas, you may check the size of VRB files that are located on your target ESX host. But thank you for your feedback, it provides us the proper direction to improve upon our product offerings.

[romanos]

OK. Thank you for a suggestions.
As you write that I can track VRB files for a changes which takes place in VM. If I would want copy backup files to the tape I must backup first full backup file VBK and than only differencial VRB files? Than I'll be able restore VM to the wanted time of backup?

[Gostev]

Roman, so I assume you have switched from replicas to backups now, since you are talking about VBK?

Each time you will need to backup the VBK file (this file is updated during each incremental pass, and represents full backup of the latest VM state), as well as any amount of VRB (these would define how many steps you can "go back" from the latest state). If you are backing up you backup files daily, you would want to copy VBK file only (its name does not change, so you can create a script for such copy, and put the script as post-job activity in the Veeam Backup advanced job settings).

For more information about Veeam synthetic backup, please refer to the following post:
Veeam Synthetic Backup Explained

[romanos]

Thanks for help. I'll study next threads releated to his topic.
Roman