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VMWare incremental backups are too large

Service_Informa
Level 3

I have a problem with incremental bakcups of a VMWare Virtual Machine.

Our Environment: Backup Exec 2010 R3 build 5204 on a Windows 2008 R2 Box. vSphere 5.1 (not yet supported, I know) hosting many Windows 2008 R2 boxes, backuped thru VMWare Agent and SAN-connected.

Most of the VMs are backuped well.

The one that is disscussed here is doing good full weely backups (520 GB). The problem is with daily incrementals, which are too large compared to the amount of data changed on the file system, which are now around 263 GB. As far as I can go in the job History, the incrental size was 38 GB on 23 march, 64 GB on 04 april, and continously growing (106 GB on 07 may, 119 GB on 14 may...).

If I look for modified file on the system (with powershell get-childitem "E:\" -recurse | where-object {$_.mode -notmatch "d"} | where-object {$_.lastwritetime -gt [datetime]::parse("20/06/2013") -and $_.lastwritetime -lt [datetime]::parse("22/06/2013")} | select lastwritetime, fullname, length | Export-Csv -Path "C:\Modified.csv" -Encoding UTF8 -Delimiter ";"), I can see that only files for a total amount of 455 MB were modified.

The jobs are belonging to a policy, the same that is used for 19 others VM without this problem. I tried to delete and create the job without success.

Searching for a solution lead me to a dead end. The only revelant informations I found is http://www.symantec.com/business/support/index?page=content&id=TECH129452, but it’s not the same behaviour and version of Backup Exec.

For now I will run only Full weekly backups, as the incremental backups are too large and filling my b2d space.

Help needed !

Thanks

4 REPLIES 4

VJware
Level 6
Employee Accredited Certified

It would be worthwhile to sign up for the Beta program which supports ESXi 5.1 .Below are few steps which you can check, however as using an un-supported config, support would be limited.

Ensure the VM doesn't contain RDM disks.

RAWS selections shouldn't be present along with VM selections in the same policy/selection list.

VMs should be powered on, have CBT enabled & run a min HW version of 7 & VADP is licensed.

 

Jaydeep_S
Level 6
Employee Accredited Certified

Unfortulately the platform that you are backing up ESX 5.1 is not supported with BE 2010 R3 till you apply a beta SP meant to enable this support. We are aware that the backups most of the times seem to work without this patch as well. However, we would not be able to predict what the outcome of this could be and hence not recomended.

Use this link to register for the beta patch.

Kunal_Mudliyar1
Level 6
Employee Accredited

Bubzilla
Level 2

Just checking to see if applying SP2 fixed your issue?  I've applied it and still have this problem.

I'm having a similar issue with many of my VM's.  The full Backups run about 30GB each, are just a standard install of Windows Server 2010 with hardly any changes happening at all and each Incremental is close to 5GB each.

Not exatly what I had in mind when choosing this strategy.

Let me know and thanks!