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Virtual disks needs consolidation - failing VM backup

  • 11 November 2021
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Hi all,

we have following issue. From time to time, there are 5 VMs that are failing their backups because virtual disks need consolidation. It occurs once in two weeks approximetlly and affected are always the same 5 VMs. Other VMs within the same VSA proxies (Hotadd mode) are backed up without this issue.

What could cause this issue and how to troubleshoot it? There is an old backup software on some of that VMs, but some VMs are without any stale backup software.

 

Take care!

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Best answer by drPhil 13 December 2021, 12:25

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Hello @drPhil 

 

Are these 5 VMs failing to consolidate snapshots taken outside of Commvault or are they GX snapshots (Commvault)

 

IF they are Commvault we can put the following additional settings in place 

nRemoveSnapshotRetryAttempts - Increase value to 10

“If a VM software snapshot cannot be removed this setting controls the of retries that are made to remove the snapshot before giving up.”

 

nRemoveSnapshotRetryIntervalSecs - Increase value to 300

Controls the amount of time to wait between attempts to remove a virtual machine snapshot after the removal of the snapshot fails.

 

What this will do is increase the amount of times Commvault will request that VMware removes the snapshots as well as increase the amount of time between each request. This is a workaround to a slow-responding vCenter/ESX environment.

 

Since this is a workaround, to address the actual issue with the VMs not consolidating I would suggest raising a case with VMware support.

"If you give a man a fish, you feed him for a day. If you teach a man to fish, they will probably burn your spot"
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Hi @Dan White,

thank you for your input!

As per your advice we have changed these values. However, the failing backup job reporting "Virtual disks needs consolidation" has arose once again. My thougth is to find and check logs describing the backup job, that can explain why virtual disks are not able to be disattached from the VM proxy. Do you have any idea where these logs are located - I have created new forum thread for it as well.

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They will be on the VSBKP.log on the VSA proxy.

You will see in there that we made attempts to consolidate the VMs.

I would suggest opening a case with VMware as this is now on their part of the software.

"If you give a man a fish, you feed him for a day. If you teach a man to fish, they will probably burn your spot"
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Hi @Dan White,

 

thank you for guidance. With your help I was able to locate the VSBKP.log log file.

 

There I have found following error messages:

 

In the log files (vsbkp.log file) I have found following errors:

 

CheckVMInfoError() - VM [vm_name] Error removing virtual machine snapshot. Please check Virtual Machine snapshot tree for any stale or missing snapshot chain.

VSBkpWorker::UnmountVM() - Leaving Cleanup string [VSIDA -j 543656 -a 2:110 -vmHost "vcenter_name" -vmName "vm_name" -vmGuid "guid_name" -vmCleanup "snapshot-xxxx" ] with JobManager as the unmount did not clear the cleanup string

RemoveDiskFromVM() - Failed to delete virtual disk [[datastore_name] xxx/vm_name-00000x.vmdk] from VM [proxy_name] with error - [Invalid configuration for device '0'.]

 

The thing is that the guys from VMware are poiting me to Commvault and vice versa :D Help!

Mike Struening RETIRED
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@drPhil , did VMWare support provide anything since last update, or was this essentially all they could give?

https://www.linkedin.com/in/michael-struening
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Hi @Dan White and @Mike Struening!

For a couple of weeks there are no "virtual disks need consolidation" message errors. The VM backups work fine without error messages. From my point of view, changing the number of nRemoveSnapshotRetryAttempts  and nRemoveSnapshotRetryIntervalSecs could help as well as removing the rest of the old backup software. However, the root cause of the issue was not found.

Thank you very much for your support!

Mike Struening RETIRED
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Thanks for sharing!  If it DOES happen again or you learn more, update us here.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/michael-struening

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