[Volved] Veeam says it failed: figuring out how much space your disks have when you use Veeam on a VM?
[Volved] Veeam says it failed: figuring out how much space your disks have when you use Veeam on a VM?
I started this post on Spiceworks figured I could check here too. Also noticed Tom's guide doesn't have a subforum for servers or server software, so it's not there either. Not sure if there is yet another forum for IT issues. I have a VM running VMware ESXi 6.7.0 with Windows Server 2016 standard as the guest OS. I am new to Veeam and VMware ESXi. My experience was just with a straight Windows server without using a virtual machine before. So this is very different than what I expected. Issue: Veeam Backup keeps throwing an error saying "Processing (VM Name) Error: Skipping VM processing due to insufficient free disk space on datastore." I know I can uncheck the option to skip VM processing when free disk space is below 5%. Background: This server already had a lot of storage added. I added an NVMe SSD and then in VMware I set it as additional storage for the Windows Server Guest OS. I configured the virtual storage size (VMFS) to take up all of the SSD, which was actually 1.8TB out of 1.82TB total. In my Windows system I formatted the drive and used the entire virtual drive space. The real data on that drive is only 601GB from a total capacity of 1.79TB. Questions: Which formatting method causes problems for Veeam with this SSD? Real data usage is just 601GB on a 2TB SSD, which is well above the 5% threshold I see in Veeam settings. So I am confused why Veeam wants to delete snapshots. Do I need to recreate all my VM storage space? This would be a huge hassle though. As I will have to take the VM offline. Since I don't think I can remove a virtual drive while the machine is running live, what happens if I try that? What are the dangers of the "Skip VM Processing when free disk space is below 5%" setting in my mind there is over 50% free space here. My guess is Veeam wants to save snapshots outside the formatted area on the SSD which makes no sense to me. Edit: Just saw the Prebuilt and Enterprise subforums now if this is better suited then mods please move there. Edit 2: I found an entry from Veeam about tuning for vSphere. I am guessing that means I need to delete my virtual drive I made then redo it, allocating enough space for snapshots first. VMware's vSphere 5.x puts snapshot VMDKs on the same datastore as the parent VMDK. If a VM has multiple disks on different datastores each datastore needs enough space for its volume's snapshots. Also consider running multiple snapshots on one datastore. According to best practices it is strongly recommended to have at least 10% free space in a datastore and even more if you are running high change rate stuff like SQL servers or Exchange servers. Note: This is the default behavior that can be changed as explained in VMware KB Article 1002929.
Got the solution from a different place online. To make sure data stays safe when you create new copies, the Datastore needs to be bigger than all your virtual disks by at least 5 percent. You should aim for between 20 and 25 percent extra space to ensure everything works well without problems later on.