Backup VMWare VMs that have existing snapshots

[cjohansen40]

This has probably been answered a handful of times but I couldn't find the answer, as searching for "snapshot" yields all kinds of results that aren't relevant to my need.

I'm using Backup Exec 2012 with the VMWare agent, and I'm trying to backup a set of VMs that have existing snapshots.  We have a number of these VMs, they are for test automation & the automation platform reverts them to their base snapshot nightly.  Is there a way, in Backup Exec 2012, to back these VMs up and make it so that we can restore them with the base snapshot intact?

I could just make a clone of the VM just after reverting it, but we have a handful of these & the base snapshot is updated fairly regularly, and I'd rather not maintain a whole separate set of clones if it's not necessary.

[CraigV]

Hi,

Backup Exec would backup the VM itself...no snapshots. 

Maybe add it in as an idea in the Ideas section:

https://www.veritas.com/community/backup-and-recovery/ideas

Thanks!

[Colin_Weaver]

Backup Exec will create a new snapshot and back that up - unfortunately when it comes to a restore of the whole VM it wil be restored using an empty snapshot (during the process) which then becomes no snapshost at the end - we cannot rebuild the snapshot chain.

However if you backup regularly enough you just restore the backup from the correct date/time point to get to a specific point in time so for most environments there is not need for a rebuild of the snapshot chain itself

Note as we use the VMware Backup API, I doubt if there is a method to rebuild the snapshot chain within backup and restore processing, so probably no point in adding as an idea as the limitation is probably in VMware VDDK code and not the Veritas BE code.