vCloud and Veeam

[Maieu_san]

Dear All,

I have a question about VMware vCloud and VEEAM backups.
At our office I have configured the backups of the vCLOUD as follows:
1 vCloud backup job per vCloud organization. This means that when a VM is created in a vApp of the vOrganization, it will be backed up automatically.
We use reversed incremental. So only one .vbk and some .vrb files will be created per job, no matter how many VM's are in the Organization in the backup jobs.

Now I was wondering what will happen with the Backup job if I delete a VM on purpose. So a VM we do not need anymore.
Is there a way to delete that VM out of the backup job, since it will take space?

Or is the only way to do this, create a backup job for every VM in the Cloud?

thanks for your response!

best regards,
Steven

[Gostev]

Hi Steven,

If you delete a VM on purpose, and have "retention for deleted VMs" enabled in the advanced job settings, all blocks occupied in VBK by the deleted VM will be marked as unused after set time passes, and the job will use them to store any new VMs added to the job later.

If you want to "shrink" VBK file immediately after a VM is delete, you need to perform an active full. Most file systems simply do not support reducing the size of an existing files, so you basically have to make the job create the new full backup file from scratch by performing Active Full backup. The new VBK will only contain VMs actually present in the infrastructure.

Thanks!

[dellock6]

Also, since a good practice is to run an active full for a reversed incremental every 2-3 months to start fresh the chain and reduce the fragmentation of the file (even if with latest patches this is way less a problem), this maintenance activity for your jobs can also help you keep backup file size under control.

Luca.