Recovery Points Usage

[FLS_Nick]

Case # 07824935

I'm confused as to why our NC2 cluster in Azure is reporting 19TB of Recovery Points. We have a very simple 5 x AN36P node cluster with just NCI Pro & security licenses and we do nothing in terms of replication or DR.

We simply backup our VM's using Veeam to Azure Blob Storage and Wasabi.

But I see many Recovery Points listed in Prism Central and each one has the name of "third party snapshot" and the size of the Recovery Point.

My question is are Recovery Points actually using this space or are a placeholder for a possible restore? When I query this behaviour I'm told these snapshots should be deleted after the backup job completes but they are not.

Can someone advise why my 80TB cluster running 250 VM's is consuming 19TB of Recovery Points where the backup data actually resides outwith Nutanix?

Can you delete these Recovery Points and still restore from Veeam?

[ronnmartin61]

@FLS_Nick the short answer is that we do maintain a recovery point between backup runs for AHV VMs. Each incremental generates a new recovery point and this snapshot is compared to the prior snapshot to compute CBT see https://helpcenter.veeam.com/docs/vbahv ... html?ver=8. The prior recovery point is removed following backup processing so that a single rolling snapshot is always present. In rare cases we have seen snapshots accrue for some reason however these are subject to your Nutanix snapshot lifetime policy (default is 30 days if memory serves but it is configurable) so they should eventually expire. If you're seeing multiple VM snapshots persist that's definitely something to work with support on resolving.
To answer your question "yes" you can recover from these. Regarding your question in the case description "yes" you can safely delete these also. The downside is that for the next incremental run we will need to perform full reads on VM disks to calculate CBT so the backups will run slower

[FLS_Nick]

Thank you for the clear and concise answer.