Various Questions

[teejeaux]

Hello Everyone! I have a friend who just inherited a Veeam Backup environment, and he's got some questions. I can't seem to find definitive answers to these questions. Can someone answer these? Or point me to a resource? Thanks!


1) Is there a VM size limit, I have a VM that is 500 GB and backup fails, tells me "authentication fail, privileges are not sufficient"

2) If the VM gets corrupted, how does the recovery work? Is there a full backup or these are just snapshops? It looks like it just take snaps

3) If I lose a primary datastore, will I be able to recover anything from the backups?

4) If these are only snapshots in time, is there a way to take a full backup, in case I lose a VM?

5) Can Veeam do a live clone of the machine?

He's also getting an error message during the privileges not sufficient thing, shown below. I'm not sure if he has submitted a ticket on this yet, but I think it's probably just that his account doesn't have permissions to create snapshots.

Freezing guest operating system
CreateSnapshot failed, vmRef "vm-71", timeout "1800000", snName "VEEAM BACKUP TEMPORARY SNAPSHOT", snDescription "Please do not delete this snapshot. It is being used by Veeam Backup.", memory "False", quiesce "True"
Cannot create a quiesced snapshot because the create snapshot operation exceeded the time limit for holding off I/O in the frozen virtual machine.


Thanks!
Michael

[Gostev]

Hi Michael,

1. No limits on VM size. The reason for failure is exactly what error says, not VM size.
2. Not sure what are you asking here. But our backups are real backups of full VM image (including configuration), compressed and deduped - not just "snaps" (although not sure what do you mean by "snaps").
3. Sure, our backups contain everything you need to restore a VM. With Veeam, you can even run VM directly from backup off your backup storage temporary, until you are restoring primary storage.
4. See 2.
5. Yes, via VM Copy job (see sticky FAQ).

The error is because of using VMware Tools quiescence (there are multiple existing topics talking about it). Disable that (which is default setting btw), and enable application-aware image processing which does the same and much more. Plus the latter is our own code that we are able to support (unlike VMware Tools quiescence issues).

Hope this helps.