Resource Not Ready: VSS Snapshot and

[jroback]

(This is open as Case #04937741)

I'm having problems trying to run an incremental backup for a vm while at the same time doing an intial replication to iLand. (The replication is taking several days since it's a large server. ) Both the backup and the replication are running from VMware against a Nimble SAN, and the jobs are using SAN Mode with storage snapshot integration.

The replications proceed as expected, but if I try to launch the incremental backup job against that VM while the replication is running, the job hangs right at the beginning and says: "Resource Not Ready: VSS Snapshot".

My understanding is that since both the replication and the backup job are using storage integration, I should be able to run the regular incremental backup job while the same VM is being replicated.

I've checked for VMware snapshots against the VM, and there are none. I've looked for vss problems on the VM and I don't see any evidence of issues. I ended up cancelling the original replication because I couldn't go this long without a backup, and when the replication was not running the incremental job runs just fine. I then started replicating a different VM, and found that this VM now has the same error message if I attempt a backup, "Resource Not Ready: VSS Snapshot".

If I turn off "Application-aware Processing" for the job, it then gets further, but stops at "Machine is locked by another task".

I've looked through the logs myself but don't see any smoking guns. When the backups hang at the resource not ready error, the last line in the job log is "[ViJobSanSource] Trying to lock following VMs: 'XXXX' for prepare in SAN job."

Support has the logs from two different jobs has been looking into this for a few days but if anyone else has any ideas on this, I'd appreciate the insight. I'm quite worried about having to go several days without backup during the initial replications for our larger VMs.

Thanks,
Jeff

[HannesK]

Hello,
that looks expected to me. The software only runs one job against one VM.

Best regards,
Hannes

[jroback]

Thanks for letting me know. Has there been any discussion of changing this functionality?

With a standard backup/replication I can completely understand this limitation, as it wouldn't make sense to run multiple jobs against the same VMware snapshot, and adding additional VMware snapshots is asking for trouble.

However, with jobs running against SAN snapshots, I'm not sure I understand the reasoning behind this limitation. The VMWare snapshot for the replication job is long gone from the VM's perspective... it's been preserved in the SAN snapshot which Veeam is using to run the replication, so the VM itself is running without a snapshot. And SANs do a masterful job of handling multiple snapshots, so I can't see any problem with doing another VMware snapshot, then taking another SAN snapshot and running a backup against that.

Obviously there's a lot going on behind the scenes that I don't understand.... but is there any reason this couldn't be added at some point? I could see limiting it to one backup job and one replication job, but beyond that, this would be a huge benefit for this scenario, backups during initial DRAAS replications.

[HannesK]

I cannot remember that feature request as a "hot" topic. Agree, that it would be useful to lift that limit. So please take your request as counted.

The main reason for features that are not available is "lack of resources" (like with any product on this planet that is missing a feature ) Technically it's probably possible because if a customer would use two different backup software products (or just two VBR servers), then it should also work.

[jroback]

Fair enough, I know everyone has different priorities It seems like it would be something that would be most valuable to people during an initial replication to cloud, and then people would forget after that. The workaround I'm considering is just using direct SAN snapshots to provide me with backups during the full replication. But would be nice to be able to have our regular backup jobs run too.

Thanks for considering it!
Jeff