Unable to publish VM - Instant recovery Linux VM

[kjstech]

Trying to do instant vm recovery of an Ubuntu LTS Server VM in vSphere 6.0u2 and I get "An error occurred while taking a snapshot: msg.changetracker.NOTOPEN." from vSphere and "Unable to publish VM" from Veeam 9.0.

I've done these before to test certain upgrades to Windows VM's but never Linux. Is there something different to do for a Linux based machine? I just want to test an upgrade of our Cacti SNMP graphing system, so I am doing Instant VM recovery into a LAB and the ESXi host I choose has access to that lab based storage and network I am going to sit the VM on.

[Gostev]

No, there are no special requirements for Linux VMs. From the error it sounds like some basic VM configuration issue with the original VM to me, our support should be able to solve this quickly - please open a support case and remember to include case ID in this topic, otherwise it will be deleted by moderators eventually. Thanks!

[tsightler]

Please see this forum post which I believe matches the issues you are seeing:
veeam-backup-replication-f2/surebackup- ... 35361.html

Certainly support should be able to help, but I thought that v9 Update 2 included the fix for this issue, any chance you have not updated your install?

[kjstech]

I checked with my vendors and we are ok to upgrade to the latest Veeam 9.5 so I am going to do that.

However I was able to accomplish what I needed by not redirecting the writes to a different datastore. When I select Instant VM Recovery and go through the wizzard to restore to a new location, or with different settings, the one option for datastore I must leave "Redirect virtual disk updates" UNCHECKED. If I keep this UNCHEKCED it works no problem. Originally I checked this off and choose a datastore on an older SAN array that we use for lab/testing/play etc... Basically non-prod. The end result was that I restored my VM, gave it a new IP, attached to network, tested my upgrade and documented the process and all went well. I was able to stop the instant recovery process and Veeam tore it down gracefully and I was able to upgrade my production VM with confidence thanks to a test run with this clone. Additionally the Veeam instant restore was faster than just a simple right click > Clone in vSphere.

[Gostev]

Awesome, great use case!