Snapshots and Veeam

[guyver1000]

Hi,
We use VMware in a test auotomation environment and developers user snapshots on running VM's to test different builds of the software they code. This process is automated so snapshots are being taken and removed 24 hours aday? What is the official number of supported snapshots these machines can have? Also can we take snapshots even during the backup cycle?


Thanks

[foggy]

Matthew, the number of snapshots doesn't matter for backup and snapshots can be created during the backup cycle. The only limitation here is that CBT could sometimes not work for VMs that have one or more snapshots before backup start (VMware limitation, actually). Before running backup and replication jobs, it is recommended to delete VM snapshots, so that the job can enable CBT on all processed VMs automatically for you. After that, you can keep using snapshots normally.

[guyver1000]

So if the Virtual machine has never had a backup taken and Veeam goes to take a first time and the machine has one running snapshot, the backup might fail?

I have machine some 27 machines that have one snapshot always and when I run the backup they always fail with:
-------------------------------------------
"Initializing target session
Failed to parse "-secure.lasttestset"
-------------------------------------------

I created a new machine and took a full backup without any snapshots and went through just fine. After that I created some 7 snapshots and removed and took more when Veeam was running and it still went through just fine. So just so i understand...for the first backup ever, should I have 0 snapshots and after the first full backup I can use them as normal?


Thanks

[foggy]

Backup should not fail in case of existing snapshots, but CBT cannot be used. CBT must be enabled on the VM when it has no snapshots. Yes, if you start a backup job when VM does not yet have any snapshots, after the first job run you can use them normally.