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MR_Bosman's avatar
MR_Bosman
Level 2
14 years ago

Backup Exec Causing File Locks on VMWARE LUNS

I have look around the net for answers to this but not found many answers, any help from the community would be gratefully appreciated.

 Our setup is
ESXi 4.1 x 4 Servers (HP DL380 G6)

HP / Left Hand iSCSI SAN P4500

2 Physical Backup Servers both HP DL380 G6


Backup Servers Running Backup Exec 2010 R2

Automount Disabled and have run several scrubs

LUN's on the backup server are connected at an iSCSI level, but not brought online in windows

 
We have had 2 times where our whole environment, nearly all VM's became unresponsive and in the vSphere console they where orphaned or inaccessible. Rebooting SAN resolves the issue, but of coarse the whole environment has to be shut down. I have been able to reproduce the fault with a test VM

 

Current Backups that are working are done as follows.

 
 
Backup server cannot see production LUN's in the iSCSI initiator,
SAN transport method in backup exec is disabled
Backups use the hot add method to perform backups.
This has worked for the last 3 weeks with no issues, Apart from being very slow.

 

How we reproduced the fault

 

Created 1 new LUN on the SAN

Created 1 new data store in vSphere on the new LUN

Cloned a VM and placed on data store

Verified that auto mount on the backup server was disabled

Connected this new LUN on the backup server, disk has not been initialised or brought online by windows.

Backed up this VM using the SAN method, disabled it from using hot add for this backup

 

What happened

The Virtual Disk for this VMBackup started, successfully created a snapshot of the VM

Backup exec backed up all data

Snapshot was attempted to be removed which failed with the following errors

Remove snapshot TEST_CC-IT-VPC-01 Unable to access file <unspecified filename>


Tried to migrate this VM to another host and got an error stating it could not access
     The vmx configuration file

     The Virtual Disk for that VM

 

Anyone else ran into this issue or know how to fix this ?

 

  • Hi ,

     

    Try to exclude Snap directory from Anti-virus. As Anti-Virus will perform scan on Snapshot and till it is completed it would not allow removal operation.

     

    Regards

    Vaibhav