Tag Archives: Veeam Capacity Tier

Error: Unable to delete backup in the Capacity Tier because it is immutable

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I was recently involved with a Veeam deployment that was running into problems during testing, their only performance tier had run out of space. Though this wasn’t unexpected as the disk provisioned was undersized and just temporary until testing was finished, it was preventing new backups from finishing successfully.

The full performance tier belonged to a Scale-Out Backup Repository that was also configured with a capacity tier (copy + move mode) backed by an immutable AWS S3 bucket. Worth mentioning those backup files in the capacity tier were still within the immutability retention period.

According to the user guide “If you use the scale-out backup repository, keep in mind that the Delete from disk operation will remove the backups not only from the performance tier but also from the capacity and archive tier. If you want to remove backups from the performance tier only, you should move those backups to the capacity tier instead. For details, see Moving to Capacity Tier.”

Attempting to perform a “Delete from disk” operation was failing with the error “Error: Unable to delete backup in the Capacity Tier because it is immutable”.

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Veeam Cloud Tier – Copy Mode

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Last December I wrote about the Cloud Tier feature coming in Veeam Backup & Replication (B&R) v9.5 Update 4, specifically the ‘Move Mode’ within Capacity Tier. It’s been one of my most popular writes ups and it still receives quite a lot of traffic even today, so now with the upcoming v10 release bringing more capability to Cloud Tier I thought it would be worth a followup. To clear up any confusion, Cloud Tier is the marketing name while Capacity Tier is the technical name used in the GUI.

Native integration between Veeam and Object Storage has and continues to be one of the most discussed topics across the Veeam community in my opinion. Before B&R v9.5U4 was released, organisations had to rely on third-party solutions to function as gateways to object storage with Veeam jobs tweaked in such a manner to reduce or eliminate any ‘calls’ to backups written to object storage to minimise egress and access fees. Often these solutions didn’t scale well, inefficient and proved cumbersome to manage.

With B&R v9.5U4 came Cloud Tier, a feature that provided native object storage integration within Veeam for Amazon S3, Azure BLOB Storage, IBM Cloud object storage and S3-compatible service providers or on-premises storage supported.

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Veeam Cloud Tier

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What happened to Archive Tier?

Archive Tier was announced back at VeeamON 2017 New Orleans alongside a raft of new features scheduled for release with Veeam Backup & Replication v10.  Archive Tier would enable Veeam administrators to easily add regular disk-based backup repositories, object-based storage repositories or even tape as an archive extent to a SOBR (Scale-Out Backup Repository) which could then be configured to copy any backup or move sealed backup files from the SOBR across to said archive extent.

The ability to archive backup files to a particular archive extent such as tape or cheaper disk was a great addition, but the significant improvement was the native integration with object storage which has been a highly requested feature for several years now. During VeeamON it was announced that AWS S3, AWS Glacier, Azure BLOB and Swift compatible object storage to be supported.

Copying Veeam backup files to object storage has always been possible through the use of third-party vendor storage gateways, such as the AWS Storage Gateway or Azure StoreSimple but speaking from my own experiences, these tools don’t always deliver what they promise and require additional skills to support.

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