Upgrading esxi from 5.5 U2 to 6.7 concerns

[tpayne]

Hello,

I am upgrading my ESXi server soon from 5.5U2 to 6.7 and I have been backing up the VMs with veeam for almost 2 years. I am aware that the latest version of Veeam is required for 6.7 which I am currently running. My concern is that an active full will be required after upgrading ESXi. I plan to upgrade the vms to at least hardware version 11.

I would like to avoid an active full, especially for the backup copy Job. This is because the backup copy job has GFS retention enabled and I am getting HUGE savings from ReFS.
We are required to keep 1 year on monthly's and logically, veeam is storing about 20 TB with all the monthly generations, when the disk usage is only about 5 TB.

I want to avoid needing to do an active full on the backup copy (I am using forever forward incremental with synthetic GFS copies being made) because I don't have the storage currently to basically have to start a new ReFS chain. (I am assuming i will basically be storing a similar amount again by the time a year goes around so I will need double until 1 year passes before refs removes all the data from the previous chain.)

The esxi upgrade is going to be a 2-step process as there isnt a direct upgrade path from 5.5 to 6.7. I have to upgrade to 6.5 U1 first.
Should I run an incremental backup after installing 6.5? and then again after 6.7?

Has anyone had any experience with a similar scenario?

Thank You.

[skrause]

If the vCenter is not changing (if you are doing the "upgrade"/migration through VMware's wizard) then the VM ids will be the same and Veeam will not need to run a complete active full even if CBT is reset. It will take longer to run the incremental if Veeam has to use their changed block filtering to read the entire disk, but it will still should only backup the incremental changes.

I am in the process of an upgrade from 5.5 myself and I upgraded all of my vCenter appliances to 6.5U1 almost a month ago and had no extra full backups necessary (I am working on testing host upgrades now).

I will be running at least one machine on an upgraded host by the middle of next week in one environment and can update you on if it just ran a normal incremental or if it kicked off an active full if you like.

[tpayne]

Thanks for the Info Steve!

I look forward to your update on the Host upgrades.

[skrause]

I migrated a number of machines to one host which I had upgraded to 6.5U1 from 5.5 yesterday afternoon as a test of the impacts of the upgrade on the Veeam backups before upgrading the rest of the cluster.

The verdict: It ran using VMware CBT just like if it had been on one of the other hosts. Performance was about the same as a normal Tuesday evening for these systems.

We run weekly active fulls on our machines (we use windows dedupe on our backup repositories which perform better if you avoid synthetic operations) so I don't typically think about doing CBT resets.

Hope this info helps.