Upgrade 4b process chews up C: disk space

[JLundgren]

Hello,

please advise concerning the following situation.

Before we update our VCC-B production site to the latest VBR 9.5 4b, I decided to test the procedure in our separate VCC-B POC environment.
Regardless if a VCC-B environment is to be upgraded or updating an onprem VBR, it turned out that you could put yourself in a difficult situation.

The VBR server in the POC environment, had approx. 7GB of free space on drive C:.
I downloaded and put the VBR 9.4 4b zip-file on the D-drive.
The zipped file together with the files after unpacking them, use approx 3.5 GB of diskspace (on drive D:).

Then I execute ”VeeamBackup&Replication_9.5.4.2866.Update-4b.exe”-wizard (from drive D:) which causes additional unpacking of files.
They are temporarily stored by default on drive C:\ProgramData\Veeam.
Before upgrade procedure even starts, A LOT of Veeam-data is copied by the wizard for security reasons, I suppose, which naturally is a good thing.

However, the free space on drive C: reduced in a high speed and backup-copies were quickly filling it up.
Luckily, VBR-server is a virtual machine and I was able to extend drive C: during the wizards' Veeam-data copying, before reaching 0 bytes of free space.

The following questions arise:

1) Is there a way, maybe through a switch, to redirect unpacking of files and the wizards' backup-copying of Veeam-data to another location (in my case towards drive D:) ?
After executing the ”VeeamBackup&Replication_9.5.4.2866.Update-4b.exe”, there is no turning back.
Also, it does not seem to check if available disk-space is enough.

2) In my case, I was able to extend drive C: before free space reduced to zero.
But what had happened if disk-extension had not existed as an option ?
What is the roll-back procedure if the Veeam-Update wizard halts due to lack of free space on drive C: ?

[JLundgren]

Hello,

everyone´s on vacation or ?

[Gostev]

I personally am

Update 4b is not somehow special, every previous update was the same.

1. Unfortunately, currently there's no switch to redirect setup to another folder. In fact, you're the first to bring this up as a feature request in all these years.

2. As far as I know, rollback in case of setup failure is automatic (built-in functionality of the setup program). At least I've seen it once myself when something did not work out.

[JLundgren]

Have a nice holiday then and sorry to bother you on your vacation

I am certainly not blaming Veeam for not having enough diskspace on drive C:, but nowadays one does not assign more diskspace on vms than neccesary.
Therefore, I think I am not the only one this has happened to.
Actually, last VBR update, the same occurred but I had forgotten all about it; the steps taken by the update file like extraction of setup- files, backup copy of Veeam files and folders.
And all these operations directed to drive C: by default.
In my case at least 10GB of disk-space was temporarily occupied by the update procedure (the zip-download not included).

Not that little, after all.
And as an SP, if this had happened in our production environment, I would have become quite nervous.

Is there a way to estimate how much space current and future Veeam updates temporarily need in total on disk C: ?

Thanks !

[Gostev]

If I could predict the future, I would be doing something else for living

I think our best bet here is to start including this information in the Release Notes for the update. Sounds fair? I'm assuming disk space consumption is something that will be very easy for our QA to measure during the upgrade testing.

[JLundgren]

No, I am not expecting you to have psychic features.
But if you could specify which files/folders you are backing up before update takes place, then it's good enough for me.

[allankjaer]

It would be a god idea if the update just check for enough, and display a warning, if there is not enough, before the upgrade begins.

[JLundgren]

Hello Anton,

In the latest forum digest about v10 upgrade path you write:

"Testing upgrades is an extremely costly and lengthy process, and is almost always what "holds" the entire release while we're making sure the upgrade is flawless."

Would it not be appropriate to include the check on available disk-space on C-drive, as per my request in this post ?

Or maybe it already is ?

[Gostev]

This is tracked, but not sure yet if it makes the release.

[JLundgren]

Ok, thanks.

[JLundgren]

Hello,

So, I am about to upgrade VBR to 4b in our VCC-B production environment.
As per my question above:

Which files/folders are being backing up during upgrade process that I need to take into account and based on that, calculate required free space om drive C:\ ?
Also, how much space does the unpacked application (also directed to C:\) require ?

Thanks in advance.

[Gostev]

QC came back with 12GB free disk space requirement for upgrade to Update 4b (this is worst case, when Enterprise Manager server is installed along with the backup server).

[JLundgren]

Thanks, that is valuable information !

[JLundgren]

Hello,

Upgrade in our VCC-B environment went well and required temporarily, all- in-all 10,1GB of space on drive C: (no EM server involved).

Just wanted to share the info.