Looking for a quick bit of clarity before we roll out Veeam CDP.
The official Veeam CDP documentation states:
VMs that you plan to protect must not have snapshots at the moment when the CDP policy starts for the first time. Further, you can add these VMs to backup jobs that will create snapshots. However, you must not create snapshots by other means, for example, manually or by another software. This may disrupt further replication operations or cause loss of important data.
When I did a quick forum search/Google on the subject I came across vmware-vsphere-f24/v11-cdp-vm-snapshot- ... 72909.html from April 2021 which seems to contradict the official documentation. This may well be that the official documentation was written post April 2021 but I just would like confirm 100% if I indeed cannot do a manual vCenter snapshot of a Veeam CDP vm. Furthermore, rightly or wrongly we have one Veeam instance for our local backup/cloud offload and another separate instance for our replication to DR. In this configuration are we going to see issues caused by the backup snapshots from instance A impacting Veeam CDP from instance B? I appreciate it says "Further, you can add these VMs to backup jobs that will create snapshots." but I would assume this would be due to being 'self aware' of the Veeam CDP jobs which in our case would not be true?
The documentation was indeed clarified after the time of original answers, so today we recommend against using manual or automatic snapshots for VMs protected with CDP (besides the ones created by backup jobs).
In your case the second backup server responsible for CDP activity will not be aware of backup activity of the first server, so the statement regarding backup jobs being exception does not apply here. So you'd better manage both backup jobs and CDP policies from the same server (preferably, from DR one).
Hello,
could you please clarify statement "today we recommend against using manual or automatic snapshots for VMs protected with CDP (besides the ones created by backup jobs)" ?
You don't recommend it or it is not supported ? Is there any impact to CDP when manual snapshot is created ?
I would say that manual VM snapshots is heavy used, so it should be clearly clarified.
Thanks.
Manual snapshots created outside of backup jobs are not supported. Snapshot deletion causes data loss for replica VM - the case where source VM was successfully replicated (even with the snapshot present), but then it gets reverted its previous state (to the said snapshot).
This why we have added the mentioned clarifications to our documentation.