During a replication job to move a few VMs to new infrastructure (ESXi 5.0 to ESXi 5.5 in 2 different VCenters), watching the progress bar anxiously as the client is very sensitive to I/O interruptions and I have bad luck with snapshot deletions, we hang here, at “Deleting helper snapshot.”
I do have patience for these things but when we look at the previous job for DC2, we can see that this task finished in a reported 9 seconds and the job completed shortly thereafter.
Anxiously I review the logs in C:\ProgramData\Application Data\Veeam\Backup\<Job_Name> and confirm that there have been no additions to the log since this last entry.
Next I review disk usage graph in VSphere console and verify that there is no I/O intensive operation occurring. There is nothing to see here.
Finally, as I prepare to open a case with Veeam, the job finally finishes successfully as shown here:
Success! Strange that it says it only took 5 seconds when it really took 2 hours.
To compare results, I looked at the log file for the job which says it took 9 seconds, and see this in the logs. Look at the discrepancy between the highlighted lines.
19.05.2015 00:58:26] <12> Info [Soap] Removing snapshot ‘snapshot-46’
[19.05.2015 00:58:26] <12> Info [VimApi] RemoveSnapshot, type “VirtualMachineSnapshot”, ref “snapshot-46”, removeChildren “False”
[19.05.2015 01:03:08] <44> Info [AP] (0339) output: –asyncNtf:Received external stop signal.
[19.05.2015 01:03:08] <73> Info [AP] (049e) state: closed
[19.05.2015 01:34:09] <53> Info [AP] (0339) state: closed
[19.05.2015 01:35:55] <12> Info [Soap] Outgoing connection ‘client01vcenter:443:DOMAIN\itadmin:False::0:12’.
[19.05.2015 01:35:55] <12> Info [Soap] Connection ‘client01vcenter:443:DOMAIN\itadmin:False::0:12’ is provided from the cache.
[19.05.2015 01:35:55] <12> Info [Soap] Loading ‘vm-45:VirtualMachine’ hierarchy
[19.05.2015 01:35:55] <12> Info [Soap] Loaded 12 elements
[19.05.2015 01:35:55] <12> Info [Soap] Connection ‘client01vcenter:443:DOMAIN\itadmin:False::0:12’ is disposing.
So, don’t worry if you are hanging at “deleting helper snapshot” in Veeam. There will be no progress on the screen and I don’t see any way to measure the progress. Relax, don’t stare at it, don’t cancel the job. There should be no impact because of this. I had no dropped pings to my server and had no I/O lockup as when deleting other snapshots.
Hope this helps!