Unable to backup Veeam VM

[fiiti]

Hi all,
I recently discovered Veeam (ofc I heard about it a long time ago but I didn't have the chance of administrating it) and, despite I find it pretty intuitive and easy to use, I am having some issues when I try to backup the Windows VM where I have Veeam installed. Let me explain the whole scenario:
- 1 ESXi with two disks = 2 datastores: Datastore-Internal and Datastore-Backup.
- 1 vcenter running on that ESXi (created thinking on scalability)
- Several VMs associated to that vcenter.

All the VMs are using disks on Datastore-Internal but, the VM with Veeam installed has a second disk with the whole size of Datastore-Backup, formatted on ReFS (Veeam recommendation). When installing and configuring Veeam I selected that second disk as the default Backup Repository.
Everything works fine with other VMs but, when I try to backup that Veeam VM I receive errors on my ESXi as if that VM were running out of space for its vmdk. It's worth noting that, when I configured the backup job, I selected only the system disk, so the disk related to the backup repository shouldn't be included on this backup.

What am I missing? I am sure this is a pretty dumb mistake, but I cannot see where am I failing.

Thanks in advance!

[wishr]

Hi Fitti,

Welcome to Veeam Community Forums!

The general recommendation is not to backup VMs where the VBR server resides using VBR VM backup functionality. Instead, you should stick with configuration backup.

Also, I would suggest deploying an independent storage for storing the backups so in case when the hypervisor fails you will still have an ability to perform restores.

Thanks

[fiiti]

That's the problem then,
I will consider installing Veeam on a different VM so it does not share resources with any other service. I am also wondering... If I have a snapshot of that VM on my vCenter and I backup that vCenter... would that also solve the problem?

Thanks for your quick answer!

[wishr]

Also, not an ideal setup as the amount of time required to perform the restore will be much longer than it could. Usually, the fastest way to start performing restores in case of a DR is to install VBR on any VM or any physical machine (including laptops), import configuration backup, then start performing restores.

I would also recommend taking a look at various articles we have published describing the 3-2-1 rule. Here are a few examples: first, second.

Thanks

[fiiti]

Great!
I will take a look to those articles and modify my configuration in order to follow best practices.

Thanks and have a good day!

[wishr]

Fiiti,

Another great source of information is the best practices site maintained by our SA team members.

Have a great day as well!