System Reserved Partition is full and the VEEAM backup job with Guest Processing option enabled will fail.

March 24, 2019 at 12:32 pm Leave a comment

When there is less free space on the System Reserved Partition , the VEEAM backup jobs will fail(Only when the Guest Processing is enabled). There are so many articles , you could use to solve this issues at the Microsoft Operating System level , leveraging Native MS Tools or some 3rd Party Disk Management Tools.

On the other hand , you could use VMware VCenter Converter to increase the System reserved Partition , by using the “Convert VM” option. To do so , during the Wizard , when you reach the last screen

Select “Data to Copy”
Then Choose “Select Volumes to Copy” in Data Copy Type.
Select the System Reserved Partition and then choose “Type size in GB” and enter the desired value.

That’s it once the VM is converted , the System reserved partition will be expanded. Now you could happily backup the VM’s using the VEEAM B&R.

Update1:

Even after the above procedure we still had the same issue . However , we were able to identify the root cause and fix it permanently with the help of VEEAM support.

Cause: Even though we increase the system reserved partition size , under System reserved partition properties (in Disk Management , Right Click on System reserved partition and select Properties) we were able to see that, the maximum limit has not been updated in the Shadow copies Tab , and it was showing the old value only.

Resolution : When we changed the settings to No Limit , voila the backup started working fine.