After moving to vSphere 6.0 all incremental backups are the same size as full

[Owiking]

We moved our our VMware environment from vSphere 5.1 to vSphere 6.0 this weekend. The backups works but all incremental jobs is the same size as full backups. Not only the first incremental job that ran after the move, but all others as well. We have now run out of diskspace on our storage and I cant get anymore backups until this is solved.

We are running Netbackup 7.7.2 on a single Master Server. We are using a VMware policy where we used VM hostname as Primary VM identifier against our old vSpehere 5.1 server, we changed it to VM display name when we moved to the new environment, vSpehre 6.0. Thus many servers got a new name and the first incremental backup after that was run as a full backup. But the days after that, all incremental backups are running as they were full backups.

Please help if you have any ideas about what we shall do!

Thanks. 

Olof

[tunix2k]

Is the NBU Client of yout VMWare Backup host configured to make incremental backups based on timestamps instead of archive bits ?

What does you mean with incremental ? Netbackup have a confused naming differential incremental and cumulativ incremntal

Regradless : Best is to start with a new Full Backup.

ciao

Martin

[Owiking]

We might have found a solution. It might be the CBT Change Block Tracking that is casuing this issue. We deleted the corresponding CTK files to a virtual machine, and re ran a Full Backup. After that I did an Incremental backup and now I only got the changes made. So it seams that the CTK files lying around was impacting the Change Block Tracking thus making all backup both Full and Incremental being the same size.

[Nicolai]

Has the VMware change block track on the VM been reset as part of the upgrade ?

Take a look the the activity monitor detailed text 

If that is the case, a new full backup is needed before accelerated backups will work again.

A Vmotion of a VM will also trunk the change block tracking file.

[jabe]

Have you found the solution?

We have the similar problem, ESX6, NB772. The incremental jobs have the same size as full backup, but only on new virtual machines (created from the same template as older VMs).  These new VMs have no ctk files on the datastore. Do we have to edit VM and enable CBT manually?

Jan