Vranger Backup Failure

[glen]

I recently came across this message for my backups:

Error: One or more disks from virtual machine is already mounted to the vRanger virtual machine. You must unmount these disks before attempting to backup the virtual machine.

It all started when I decided to deploy a Virtual Appliance via the application wizard to perform backups. The strange thing was, it only affected Linux servers. Basically according to support, this is because the Virtual Appliance still has the VMDK volume mounted. So I removed it from the VA but I still could not consolidate the Linux VM. I ended up having to delete the VM and restore from backup. But that is not the correct method. Unfortunately, I only found this out after the recovery. The reason I couldn't consolidate the snapshot was because the server that ran the Vranger application can also be used to mount the VMDK volume.

I only found this out after deleting the VM, the VMDK volume could not be deleted as it was still locked. In order to find out what was holding the volume, I had to SSH into the ESXi host and ran <lsof | grep "vmname">. It showed that it was the server that had the Vranger application installed still had the volume mounted. Removed the volume from that server and then I was able to delete the locked VMDK volume.

So should you run into this same issue, check the VA appliance and the server running Vranger Backup and Replication. I have since removed the VA appliance and stick to what have been working for many years.

[glen]

Looks like that wasn't the end of the story. It happened again to another Linux box. But I think I found the root cause. It's related to a feature called "Change Tracking". This was enabled for all my VMs. After disabling them, my backups are now working without issues.