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Veeam issues with VSS

A

ashman

Gawd
Joined
Mar 28, 2011
Messages
811
So I have a client with a SBS 2011 server on Esxi 5.5 that was being backed up by Veeam 6.5 just fine, upgrade to v8 and backups are still working with the occasional failure due to VSS timeout but usually on the first or second retry it would complete, now out of the blue they stop working all together. Veeam support says I have to contact Microsoft to fix VSS problems, to prove it they tell me to turn off application aware processing in the job, and low and behold the backup runs. Anyone run into this before? Any tips on fixing it?

I have run the command vssadmin list writers, and they all show stable no errors, yet Veeam can't run a backup? The host running Esxi is a Dell T320 with three near line SAS drives in a RAID 5 on a not so great raid controller, cant remember the model.
 
Yeah its timing out and I have already increased the timeout to 2500000 and it still fails.
 
Is SBS running exchange as well? If so, that timeout is hardcoded and you can't do anything about it. What's backend disk that it's running on?
 
What is the disk setup for this VMware host? RAID type, controller, disk setup, disk type, that sort of thing.
 
Three 1TB SATA drives Perc H310 RAID 5. The backups used to work, they often failed the first time but would succeed the second or third time, not they fail every time.
 
I'd be willing to bet it's that disk setup, just too much going on for VSS to work correctly.

http://www.veeam.com/kb1680

VMware snapshot takes longer than 20 seconds (hardcoded Exchange VSS Writer timeout)

Exchange freeze is too I/O intensive on the storage and backup time and or Exchange datastore may need to be modified.
Click to expand...

What else is running on that disk or is it just the SBS 2011 server?
 
The only other VM on the host is a VCenter appliance which runs VCenter server.
 
SBS 2011 alone is probably too much for that disk setup. You could probably upgrade to a perc h710p and get much better disk performance, plus you have the option to use cachecade if it still isn't enough.
 
I understand a better raid controller would help, but the Veeam backups used to work, and if I turn of application aware processing in Veeam, they work.
 
They work because without application awareness, it's just taking a blind snapshot which will always succeed - no quiescing beyond possibly the basic filesystem ones (can't remember if veeam calls for a standard quiesced snapshot or not with that option off - been a bit and I don't have it running rightn ow).
 
The issue appears to be you don't have the disk io to do a proper vss application aware freeze for exchange along with a vmware snapshot of the vm. Since exchange is hardcoded for 20 seconds, it has to do all of this within that timeframe. Obviously the vCenter server that's doing the snapshot of the vm running on the same RAID 5 array isn't helping things.
 
Is the VSS error related to preparing the guest, or specific to Exchange?

If the former, you could try increasing the timeout more. Something must've changed on the system to cause it to fail with a 41 minute timeout (2500000ms) whereas it used to work before with the default 15. I have one system that I have to continually increase the timeout for as the data on it grows, it's currently over four hours.

If it's the later, as above, I think you just don't have enough disk IO.

It may have worked on the second or third retry before just based on dumb luck - depending on exactly how busy the system was on each try.
 
Do you ever see issues with the VMware snapshots, especially when Veeam is calling the API to remove the snapshot? I had similar issues with Exchange and frequently saw snapshot issues as well.
 
No these issues seem to have to do with shadow copies on the SBS server, deleting them resolves the problem.
 
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