Questions[vcb](server)

We are running ESX 3.5.0 and are using VCB for making backups. Yesterday VCB failed to remove its snapshot. That has happened a couple of times before, and I removed it manually as usual. But this time the VCB snapshot got replaced by a "Consolidate helper" snapshot instead.

We have had a snapshot that was hard to delete before, so I knew that if I created another snapshot and then selected "Delete all" in Snapshot Manager, it should delete all snapshots. So at the end of the day I shutdown the server, created another snapshot and then deleted all snapshots. All snapshots disappeared from Snapshot Manager, and I went home.

Today the server had been "paused" by VMware, since all disk space on the LUN had been filled by snapshot delta/redo/vmdk files. I had to move another servers disk from the LUN to make it resume again. So the snapshot was not removed after all. There are now several delta/redo/vmdk files on the LUN, but no snapshot i the Snapshot Manager in the GUI.

How do I remove this snapshot?

I'm using BackupExec and VCB to backup a few VMs. As I understand it, the pre-job script creates a snapshot of my VMs, mounts them as virtual directories on my backup server, and then my backup exec job just backs up the local folders like normal. The problem I'm having occurs during the pre-job script and the directory for one particular server is never mounted.

When I look at the VI client and look at recent activity, I see the snapshot has begun but hasn't finished. It appears to time out after 15 minutes, and thus the server is never backed up.

I have multiple VMs being backed up this way and the others work fine. The troublesome VM has a virtual disk of 85GBs, however, another VM that does work has a virtual disk of nearly 100GBs.

I'm wondering what else about a VM could cause the snapshot to take a long time to create. Is it an issue with the VM host perhaps? The VM host is a very powerful server, and none of the VM guests are used heavily, plus the backups are run off-hours so it shouldn't be a case that the server is just overworked. Are there any logs or tools I can use to see what's slowing the snapshot down?