Disk consolidation error in vsphere

[sandroalves]

Hi,

I have a VM that after problems with snapshot appeared message of consolidation of disk. Due to this problem Veeam is unable to backup the VM.

I know that we need to perform some procedures to correct this, such as: (perform consolidation, or take a snapshot and remove or clone the machine as a last resort).

Well, but I need to make a backup of the machine to restore it in case there is a problem during these processes.

The only option I have in this case is to install the agent and back it up, correct? And if I lose that VM, return with that backup.

Could I, after backing up this VM, configure a replication task to bind this VM to another host? So would my downtime be small and could I remove the original one?

Thank you.

[Egor Yakovlev]

Hi Sandro,
- if VM snapshot is not possible, than yes - in-guest agent-based backup with Veeam Agent is here to help! Don't forget to create Veeam Recovery Media too.
- if VM dies in the process of consolidation(don't see any reason why it should die anyway, as disk consolidation is a common disk operation), you can just delete corrupted disk and add new ones. With that setup you can perform Bare-Metal restore using Recovery Media boot.
- Agent-based backup volumes can be converted into VMDK disks in advance so, if VM dies it will take much less time to restore back(re-map disks and launch)
/Thanks!

[sandroalves]

Hi,

grateful for the technical clarifications.

However, what happens is that any type of activity related to snapshot in our environment causes VMs to hold. Often! I believe it is for performance reasons.

During the Veeam backup routine, we have no problems, only when we usually run a snapshot manually.

So as I know the process will take a long time because the disks are large and as we know about this VMs hold problem I wanted to use Veeam Replication to create a new virtual machine and remove the old one that is in need of consolidation.

Yes, I believe that the name of the VM in vSphere will be non-standard, its files (.vmdk and .vmx), but that is not a problem.

What I need is to reduce the downtime of this disk correction activity.

As I am already going to back up with an agent, I would also enable replication for another host. As soon as the Veeam Backup replication process is finished, I disconnect one and connect the other.

What do you think?

Thank you.

[Egor Yakovlev]

Veeam Replication relies on VM snapshots too, so if backup fails due to snapshot operation - so will replication job. What you should do, is to backup this machine with Agent(just in case), and run disk consolidation. It should finish successfully while machine is online, unless you have other infrastructure-related problems. With that, you will have no downtime, nor have to use agent-based backup. After consolidation completes you can utilize VM level backups and VM level replication.
As a side note, if you are digging into infrastructure-related \ performance issues, feel free to check Veeam One's Infrastructure Assessment Reports which will show you most critical configuration and performance issues in your infrastructure in a matter of 5 minutes! I would also check alarms that will pop in Veeam One Monitor at the same time - it will be a few clicks to find VMs with outdated VM Hardware version, VMs with no VMware Tools, VMs with high memory ballooning etc. Whenever it comes to virtual infrastructure performance or issues, Veeam One is a first tool I use, and trust me, it makes wonders sometimes!
/Thanks!

[spiritie]

OP you might wanna check out this KB from VMware: https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/10051
It can maybe tell what is locking the disks since the consolidating is failing.

I've had a few cases where the VMware proxy that was hot-adding, failed to remove the disks from the proxy,
because of real time scans for third party AV's, this resulted in the consolidation warning in vCenter.

You might wanna check out if this is the case for you aswell.

[sandroalves]

Hi,

grateful for the tips. It is a lot of useful information.

Just to finish the understanding.

Can Veeam Replication be used on VMs with both agent and agentless?


Thank you.

[Egor Yakovlev]

Veeam VM Replication is 100% agentless. Agent-based backups created with Veaam Agent for Windows\Linux cannot be used to create vSphere Replica VM.
/Cheers!

[sandroalves]

OP you might wanna check out this KB from VMware: https://kb.vmware.com/s/article/10051
It can maybe tell what is locking the disks since the consolidating is failing.

I've had a few cases where the VMware proxy that was hot-adding, failed to remove the disks from the proxy,
because of real time scans for third party AV's, this resulted in the consolidation warning in vCenter.

You might wanna check out if this is the case for you aswell.

Hi,

antivirus always disturbing our life. It was good that you mentioned that pessibility. I will check this out too.

We never had a problem with backup because we always use an agent, even when the solution provided agentless options.

But from some we start to realize that when we take a manual snapshot the server changes the status to (Vmtolls Not Running) and literally freezes.

After the snapshot is finished, the VM releases again. But that happens for some and not others. Soon we think it is a performance problem, but everything works normally and only in snaphost activities we realize this problem.

Nowadays to avoid problems and speed up the snapshot process we are shutting down the VMs, but this is very bad.

However, when we use the agentless backup solution we do not have a server freeze problem, but we do have other application freeze problems.

But yesterday, reading some conversations here in the community, I discovered that what is causing the problem is Application-aware.

I disabled it and had no more problems with the applications, but we run the risk of the integrity of the backup of these applications.

The Windows event viewer showed several VSS events when the application froze. There are also several disk disconnect and reconnect events.

From the moment we started using agentless I started to notice problems in the applications. And the funny thing is that other friends from other companies that use other backup solutions started to have problems with application freezing.

Thank you.

[sandroalves]

Veeam VM Replication is 100% agentless. Agent-based backups created with Veaam Agent for Windows\Linux cannot be used to create vSphere Replica VM.
/Cheers!

Hi,

Does this mean that I cannot use Veeam VM Replication to back up a physical machine and use the backup to create a virtual machine ready to be powered on?

Thank you.

[Egor Yakovlev]

Correct.