Backup chain deletion after upgrading vSphere

[joshwinters]

All,

We are running Veeam v9 with reverse incremental backups.

My company recently upgraded from vSphere 5 to 6. After the upgrade, I had to clear out and re-add my datastores in order for the backups to start processing successfully since the IDs had all changed. After doing this, I noticed that all backups appeared to take far longer than usual. It was almost as if it was performing an active full for every server again. What I noticed next was that all backups appeared to be doubled up - so that all servers were listed twice under my backups on disk view. I proceeded to delete the old backup chains (the server is not yet in production, so this was fine) but I noticed that no space was freed up.

How can I realize the free space now that all of the old backup chains have been deleted?

Thanks in advance!

[alanbolte]

This is expected behavior. As far as Veeam is concerned, what you did was add new VMs to the jobs, remove old VMs from the job, and then told the job to mark datablocks in the backup files associated with the old VMs as unused. There probably was some deduplication between the two VMs in the backup file (depending on settings), but other than that, Veeam identifies VMs only by their ID, not by their content.

In previous versions, you would have to run a new active full backup, and then allow the old full to be deleted by your retention settings. In v9, depending on your job settings, you may want to schedule a compact operation instead.

[joshwinters]

I will try the compact operation and will post back with the result. Thanks for your help!

[joshwinters]

Compact looks like it fixed the issue. I appreciate your help greatly!