Slow Backup - old snapshot?

[itm@mcdonald]

Hi
While investigating two of my servers that were going offline (Exchange and SQL) we have noticed two things:
1. The removals of the snapshot takes about 20 - 30 minutes and during the last half of this operation the live server becomes unresponsive
2. While looking into that I found that the SQL server has a VEEAM TEMPORARY SNAPSHOT from July

My first question is what should I do with that snapshot? I assume consolidate it?
Second question is what would cause the removal of the snaphsots to be so slow (compared to less than a minute say for my main File Server?

Cheers
Simon

[nielsengelen]

Hi Simon and welcome to the forums. This is something that we see more often.

1. Sadly this is a VMware issue, we use the API's provided and can't speed it up. However if you have HP or NetApp storage (and with v9 EMC) we can levarge Storage Snapshots. Also have a look at http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/micros ... Id=1002836
2. You can consolidate this snapshot yes.

The removal can be slow due to the fact that the server is a busy server with lots of I/O. There are lots of factors which come in to play as well as the storage underneath. VMware made a KB about this: http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/micros ... Id=2053758

[Vitaliy S.]

Hi Simon,

1. Here is an existing topic with a similar question. Please look it through > Snapshot removal issues of a large VM
2. All Veeam temporary snapshots should be consolidated automatically by a backup/replication job. If it is not happening, you can open a support ticket to review VM log files. Another thing that I would suggest doing is installing free version of Veeam ONE that can monitor VM snapshots and can send automatic email notifications about any orphaned VM snapshot in the production infrastructure.

Thanks!

[Gostev]

And yes, presence of old snapshots may impact the speed of committing newer ones.