This is an archive version of the document. To get the most up-to-date information, see the current version.

VM Configuration Assessment

This report helps you to assess VMs readiness for performing backup with Veeam Backup & Replication.

The report analyzes configuration of VMs in your virtual environment, and shows potential issues and possible limitations that could cause backup process to fail or prevent VMs from being properly backed up.

VM Configuration Assessment Note:

This report is available for VMware vSphere environments only.

The report takes into account the following criteria when analyzing VM configuration:

Summary

The Summary section contains the following charts:

Virtual Machines Overview shows VMs with potential issues and ready to backup VMs.
Potential Issues shows number of VMs with potential issues.

Details

VMware CBT

Criterion	Description
Existing Snapshots	The report analyzes your virtual infrastructure to find VMs with existing snapshots. To use VMware Changed Block Tracking for incremental backup, all existing snapshots must be removed.
Hardware Version 4 or earlier	The report analyzes your virtual infrastructure to find VMs with hardware version 4 or earlier. To use VMware Changed Block Tracking for incremental backup, hardware version of VMs must be 7 or later.

Criterion

Description

Existing Snapshots

The report analyzes your virtual infrastructure to find VMs with existing snapshots.

To use VMware Changed Block Tracking for incremental backup, all existing snapshots must be removed.

Hardware Version 4 or earlier

The report analyzes your virtual infrastructure to find VMs with hardware version 4 or earlier.

To use VMware Changed Block Tracking for incremental backup, hardware version of VMs must be 7 or later.

Virtual Disks

Criterion	Description
VMs with Independent Disks	The report analyzes your virtual infrastructure to find VMs with independent virtual disks. Veeam Backup & Replication does not support independent disks; these disks are skipped from processing automatically.
Virtual Machines with 2 TB virtual disks that are not running in vSphere 5.5 cannot be snapshotted and backed up	The report analyzes your virtual infrastructure to find VMs with 2 TB virtual disk size. For ESXi 5.0, 5.1 and 5.5, the maximum virtual disk (VMDK) size for snapshot operations is limited to 1.984492366201720 TB. For more information, see the VMware KB article.
VMs with disks engaged in SCSI bus sharing	The report analyzes your virtual infrastructure to find VMs that use SCSI bus-sharing. VMware does not support taking snapshots of Microsoft Clustering Services (MSCS) VMs. For more information, see the VMware KB article.
Virtual disk size is not a multiple of 1 KB	The report analyzes your virtual infrastructure to find VMs with unaligned virtual disks. Veeam Backup & Replication does not support backup copy jobs and restore jobs for VMs with unaligned disks. For details, see the Veeam KB article.
VMs with pRDMs	The report analyzes your virtual infrastructure to find VMs with RDMs used in physical compatibility mode. Veeam Backup & Replication will automatically exclude RDMs used in physical compatibility mode from the backup job. For details, see the VMware KB article.

Application-Aware Image Processing

Criterion	Description
VMs with Windows Server 2000 Guest OS	The report analyzes your virtual infrastructure to find Windows Server 2000 VMs. To enable backup with application-aware image processing, upgrade guest OS to Windows Server 2003 or later.
VMware Tools Not Running	The report analyzes your virtual infrastructure to find VMs that do not have with VMware Tools installed or running. To enable backup with application-aware image processing, it is required that guest OS running inside your VMs has VMware Tools installed and running.

Criterion

Description

VMs with Windows Server 2000 Guest OS

The report analyzes your virtual infrastructure to find Windows Server 2000 VMs.

To enable backup with application-aware image processing, upgrade guest OS to Windows Server 2003 or later.

VMware Tools Not Running

The report analyzes your virtual infrastructure to find VMs that do not have with VMware Tools installed or running.

To enable backup with application-aware image processing, it is required that guest OS running inside your VMs has VMware Tools installed and running.

Datastore Free Space

Criterion	Description
VMs on datastores with 10% of free space	The report analyzes your virtual infrastructure to find datastores that have less than 10% of free space. When Veeam Backup & Replication backs up a VM, it triggers a VMware snapshot that is normally stored next to VM files on the source datastore. To eliminate the problem of datastores running low on free space during backup, it is required that the free space is more than 10%.

Criterion

Description

VMs on datastores with 10% of free space

The report analyzes your virtual infrastructure to find datastores that have less than 10% of free space.

When Veeam Backup & Replication backs up a VM, it triggers a VMware snapshot that is normally stored next to VM files on the source datastore. To eliminate the problem of datastores running low on free space during backup, it is required that the free space is more than 10%.

Others

Criterion	Description
Unsupported VM names	The report analyzes your virtual infrastructure to find VMs with names that contain the following symbols: @ / \ < >. Veeam Backup & Replication does not process VMs with names that contain mentioned symbols. If you want to back up these virtual machines, you must rename them.

Criterion

Description

Unsupported VM names

The report analyzes your virtual infrastructure to find VMs with names that contain the following symbols: @ / \ < >.

Veeam Backup & Replication does not process VMs with names that contain mentioned symbols. If you want to back up these virtual machines, you must rename them.

Report Parameters

You can specify the following report parameters:

Scope (VI): defines a virtual infrastructure level and its sub-components to analyze in the report.
vCloud Director: defines vCloud Director components to analyze in the report.
Business View objects: defines Veeam ONE Business View groups to analyze in the report. The parameter options are limited to objects of the Virtual Machine type.
Issues: defines VM assessment criteria to include in the report.
Skip backup replicas: defines whether to include in the report VM replicas created with Veeam Backup & Replication.

Use Case

This report allows you to obtain a list of VMs in your virtual environment that could experience potential issues with backups, and to get guidance on how to resolve these issues.