Consolidate Virtual machine disk files

[Gravelrider]

Hi there

I am trying to understand what is going on here.
This is in relation to a backup of golden horizon image.

We are getting following email alert that says

VDI-Master on vcenter need snapshot consolidation, but all the automatic snapshot consolidation attempts have failed.
Most likely reason is a virtual disk being locked by some external process. Please troubleshoot the locking issue, and initiate a snapshot consolidation manually in vsphere client

vSphere does not indicate that consolidation is needed. And Horizon always needs a snapshot

We had a look in the VBR console itself and there are no errors

When I looked at the VM tasks in vCenter though I see that several times a day, outside of backup window,

Task Name: Consolidate Virtual machine disk files
Status: Completed
Initiator: <veeam service account>

Why is Veeam triggering this task? Backups complete successfully. I see a backup snapshot is taken and removed. I assume this is because of Horizon snapshot but not sure why Veeam is doing the consolidate task several times a day

Any thoughts appreciated

[david.domask]

Hi Gravelrider, welcome to the forums.

Can you confirm that if you navigate to the template's location on the datastore in the vCenter webclient, you do not see any snapshot files? (will end in 00000N.vmdk, where N is some number > 1)

If you do not, then indeed the behavior sounds incorrect, and I'd ask you to please open a Support Case. Technical issues cannot be troubleshot over the forums, and likely this will need a review of the logs to understand why Snapshot Hunter (the feature that handles consolidation) is not behaving as expected.

Be sure to include logs for Support to review. (Use the 3rd radio button to export logs from selected hosts, select the Veeam server itself to export from).

Please share your case number here once created.

Thanks!

[Gravelrider]

Thanks David

I do see snapshot files, as expected. A Horizon golden image needs a snapshot. This one as two.
Are you saying that this behavior is expected as long as there is a snapshot on a VM?

I am not dealing with the VEEAM infrastructure personally so will ask engineer to log a job if need be

[david.domask]

> Are you saying that this behavior is expected as long as there is a snapshot on a VM?

Not quite; Snapshot hunter (the process I suspect is triggering this) looks for machines it identifies as needing consolidation. So it's not just the presence of a snapshot, but those requiring consolidation due to a failed clean up, etc.

I would say that indeed, a case is the best approach then as it would be best to let Support check the logs and see why the consolidation request is being triggered.

[poolshark1]

We have a similar persistent VDI golden image machine in VMware. The difference is that ours is for our Citrix XenApp environment, as opposed to VMware Horizon. We need to retain multiple manual snapshots of that machine (up to 5) for both golden image updating and potential rollback purposes. But with Veeam inherently not liking the presence of manually created snapshots, I found either in the version 12 vSphere user's guide or some Veeam KB article somewhere (sorry, I can't find the exact reference right now) one key recommendation on how to configure the backup job of the golden image machine.

We disabled changed block tracking (CBT) completely under the Storage > Advanced.. > vSphere tab. That should also disable the sub-options for Enable CBT for all protected VMs automatically and Reset CBT on each Active Full backup automatically. Veeam does not complain about the manual snapshots, and it doesn't delete or attempt consolidation of them either.