I am going to deploy a Backup Exec environment on a vessel and have it in testing at the moment. We have two vmware esxi 4.1 servers with a total of three virtual windows 2008 R2 servers on them. One server has vcenter installed on it, and the same server is also the backup exec media server. We have a local san where all virtual servers are installed, and we have a NAS where we intend to put all our backups in.
This normally works well. We take vmware backups (hotadd since media server is a virtual server which cant have direct access to the san) of two virtual servers and the third (which is the media server) we take a normal backup of (we would like to take vmware backups of that one, but for some reason that is not possible?).
Now to the problem. When we take vmware backups, it does it like this:
1. Backup exec makes a snapshot of the virtual server.
2. It mounts the disks to the media server.
3. It makes a list of the files to backup.
4. Unmounts the disks.
5. Take backups of the files.
6. Remove the snapshot.
I'm a little unsure about the order of 3,4 and 5, but it seams this way when i look at it during a backup. My problem is that sometimes (not always) it skips step 4 in my list. I havent figured out when it skips or why, but it causes big problems. If the disks still are mounted to the media server, the snapshot cant be removed. which takes diskspace on my san. When the next backup runs 24 hours later, it does the same, so now i have two snapshots. If i dont see this, it will consume all my san disk, and then everything will go very bad.
One more thing, the backup goes just fine. So i cant see the problem in Backup Exec. I have to log in to my vmware vcenter and check if any server has snapshots left, or if the media server has disk mounted that it shouldn't have. To solve it then, i have to remove the disks from the media server and remove the snapshots manually. Then the backup could go fine for days or weeks, but then the problem come back (at least thats what i've seen so far).
I couldn't find anything about this when searching so i try to post here to see if anyone else have seen this or if i'm the only one to have this. We've started to think if we really need the vmware backups, and will most likely go to normal client backups instead, but it would be nice to see if there is some other problems in our environment that is causing this or if this is a known problem?
regards
/Henric
