Veeam Creates Automatic Snapshots of an Active Directory VM

[Cyber_Halo_VIII]

Hello Everyone i have short Question.

I have an Veeam as Backup installed on a ESXI and got an Active Directory Server VM this VM creates automatic Snapshots and because it does that the Backup has not enough space and fails.
And i dont know where to configure it so it doesent create automatic Snapshots all the time.
I hope someone can help me.

[rennerstefan]

Hi,

not sure I understand your question. Part of the backup process is to create VMware Snapshots of the relevant VMs.
Do you mean we create them without a job being running?
If you need a different way to back it up you also may want to have a look at our Veeam Agents!?

Let us know

Thanks

[Andreas Neufert]

Can you please as well clarify if you mean space within the running VM disks or within VMware datastores? Or do you use the storage integration and run out of space there?

[Cyber_Halo_VIII]

Hi Stefan and Andreas,

thank you for your response! Let me clarify my situation:

I am using Veeam Backup & Replication (Community Edition) on an ESXi 6.7 Host without vCenter.
The Active Directory VM (SRV-AD-01) is included in a weekly backup job in Veeam.
I understand that Veeam creates a snapshot during the backup process, but in my case, multiple snapshots keep appearing even when no backup job is running.
These extra snapshots accumulate over time, filling up my VMware datastore (VMFS6, 1.5TB total, ~400GB free) and causing backup failures.
When I check in ESXi > Monitor > Events, I see snapshots being created, but I don’t know which process is triggering them.

[rennerstefan]

Hi again,

what names do the snapshots have?
What user is creating them? is it the same user Veeam uses? if you only use one user overall you could create a separate Veeam account just for your backup so you can clearly see if it is that account performing the snaps.
If there is no Veeam Job running you should not see Veeam snapshots.

Thanks

[Cyber_Halo_VIII]

Hi again,
I checked the snapshots in ESXi > Snapshot Manager, and all of them are simply named "Snapshot" (no specific name like "Veeam Snapshot" or similar).

Also, in ESXi > Monitor > Events, I can see that these snapshots are being automatically created, but I don’t know what process is triggering them.

[veremin]

In that case, it doesn’t seem like our product is responsible for creating these snapshots.

As Stefan suggested earlier, you could check under which specific user they were created or examine the vCenter for any activities around the same time - this might give you a clue as to what led to the creation of the snapshots.

Thanks!