Posts filed under ‘Veeam’
DC & Exchange loses connection during VEEAM Backup
Problem:
Outlook users get disconnected periodically (at the same time everyday).
When we analyzed the situation, we found out that the issue coincides with the backup windows. Further, investigation reveals that it happens exactly at the time of VMware snapshot removal stage, and this is quite normal ,since the VM will experience a longer VM stun.(Can be confirmed by looking in to the vmware.log). This was causing the VM (Domain Controller) to freeze, and at this time the Exchange triggers a Netlogon error with the eventID 5719 because it loses the connection to the domain controller. The outlook users (Desktop & Smartphone) will be forced to re-open the email client or re-enter the credentials.
Solution:
So to avoid this , we had to convert the backup job from VM based to an Agent based. The agent based backup uses the VSS instead of VMware API triggered VM based snapshots.
Once the above is changed , we did not see any Netlogon event ID 5719 appeared and the users did not complain thereafter.
Good Luck
System Reserved Partition is full and the VEEAM backup job with Guest Processing option enabled will fail.
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.
Veeam Backup Repository Sizing
Folks who wants to size the Backup Repository for their Veeam Deployment , could make use of the online sizing tool below for their calculations.
It is very user friendly and output is much descriptive.
Good Luck.
How to expire Veeam Backup Jobs
When using Veeam B&R , if you had to face a situation where you need to expire the old backups to free up some disk space you need to follow slightly a different approach. As mostly in other cases (especially VERITAS) you could simply change the retention period to a lower value and need to restart the services , you could notice the backup files have been disappeared. In Veeam you need to go through the below steps.
- Remove the backup files manually (recommended to clear the files created by the last incremental jobs until you reach to the last full backup).
- Reduce the backup pointer to a lower value in your backup job.
- Then you need to start the jobs manually or wait for the next schedule.
VCSA6.7 and Veeam B&R Issues
Recently we were upgrading our ESXi Infrastructure from ESXi 6.0 to 6.7.During this process we kicked off the migration process with our VCenter Server 6.0 with the intention to move it to a VCSA 6.7 . Everything went well . But on the following day we started receiving Backup job failure alerts from Veeam Server.
After few google searches we came to know that the Veeam B&R need to be upgraded with U3 to be fully be compatible with Photon based VCSA 6.7 .
Good Luck with your VSphere Upgrades.
Hope you like it.. 