Veeam BR: esxii stuck on read only

Hi ​@haritiana rakotoarisoa 

Error: Failed to open VDDK disk [[Datastore_DELL_PowerEdge_120] VM-DNS1/VM-DNS1-1-000001.vmdk]

First, looks like the VM has leftover snapshots -- you may want to check this both in the snapshot manager and also on the datastore itself (sometimes there are leftover delta files on the datastore not present in the snapshot manager)

The “read-only” there isn’t about the ESXi host or VM being read only, the VDDK connection is read only. VDDK is the software library used by backup applications (like Veeam) to perform backups and restores to VMware, and that line indicates that the connection is a read-only connection to the VM disk.

We can know the machine has leftover delta-files because during backup with VDDK, the process is:

1. Take a snapshot
2. Connect to the base disk (i.e., not the snapshot disk)
3. Read from the base disk
4. Close connection to disk
5. Consolidate snapshot

So reading from a snapshot file is not expected, and likely is causing your issues.

Since you’ve already restarted the services and the host, it might still be worth checking if the management agents are running properly, sometimes they don’t recover cleanly after a general restart.

You can manually restart just those two without affecting networking or storage:

/etc/init.d/hostd restart
/etc/init.d/vpxa restart

If that doesn’t help, you can restart all services with:
services.sh restart

If the issue persists, you can also try removing and re-adding the ESXi host to vCenter. Keep in mind this will change the MoRef ID, so your backup software (e.g., Veeam) will see it as a new host and require a new full backup.
If the affected VM is small and a new full is acceptable, this can help clear stale connections or mismatched references between vCenter and the host.

And definitely check for leftover delta or snapshot files directly in the datastore, even if Snapshot Manager looks clean, stray *-00000x.vmdk files can still cause this kind of read-only VDDK issue.

And if taking or consolidating snapshots does not work you can try a storage vmotion to move the VM which cleans up the files then try a backup again.

Check to see if there are any Veeam proxies that still have this VM’s disks hot-added to them. Sometimes they don’t disconnect properly and can cause issues with backups. Be sure to just remove from the proxy, and not remove/delete from datastore.

Hi we tried it but it was not working. 

We use Veeam CE as a second Backup and NAS Synology as first. The NAS works fine on every esxii but the veeam do not seem to cooperate even thought we tried these methode

Regards

Can you please clarify what you tried? Did you observe leftover snapshots or snapshot files? Were you able to consolidate them successfully?

Did you check this as Tommy mentioned?  If it is not snapshots then it could be this.

Otherwise open a support ticket.

We tried 

/etc/init.d/hostd restart
/etc/init.d/vpxa restart 

and service.sh restart 

there are no snapshot leftovers on the VM we tried to backup and we are able to consolidate snapshot. The NAS backup works fine on every esxii but the veeam do not seem to cooperate even thought we tried these methode.

We will try opening a ticket to help us