Veeam VSS Snapshot Behavior when using Backup from (secondary) Storage Snapshots

[derda05]

Hi all,

at one of my customers I have a brand new installation of Veeam.
We are using the Storage Integration within NetApp storage.
We are backing up to a fairly slow backup repository from the secondary storage appliance snapshots after doing a snapmirror.

It seems that way, that at least on one Exchange Server the VSS snapshot got kept till the whole job completed. As the writing to the backup repository is very slow and needing a lot of time, this lead to a outage of the Exchange Database due too much storage consumption of the VSS snapshot.

Is this by design? I would have assumed, that the VSS snapshot get deleted after the VSphere snapshot or the primary NetApp snapshot. No advantage to keep the VSS snapshot on the VM for so long?
If it is by design, is there any way to avoid / change that behavior?

Thanks,

Dennis

[Andreas Neufert]

If we detect that Exchange take longer than the internal VSS processing of Exchange we perform persistent snapshots to avoid and VSS timeout error.
Basically we keep the snapshot then until the backup ends.

I think you have 2 option now:
1) Check why Exchange will not create the VSS Snapshot in the Exchange VSS Writer hard coded time (20 sec)
2) Add additional Storage

Please check: https://helpcenter.veeam.com/docs/backu ... tml?ver=95 for details.
As well please check http://andyandthevms.com/exchange-dag-v ... plication/ for tips and tricks and optimization possibilities.

As well I would suggest to create a Veeam Support ticket and upload logs so that our people can check if the processing works as expected and we can escalate this with it. I see as well no need for keeping the snapshot until SM was updated. But maybe there are reasons for it. Again, please create the support ticket and upload logs. Thank you.