Veeam – Unable to allocate memory for storage metadata

Problem

Recently I was asked by a colleague for some help with an Exchange item restore request from a customer.

Not a problem“, I said , “we backup their Exchange environment with Veeam. Just fire up the Exchange explorer, find the item you’re looking for and restore

About an hour or so later, my colleague returns saying the restore job keeps failing, with this error

Veeam_Error

Investigation

The line that caught my attention was:-

“Unable to allocated memory for storage metadata bank”

Looking at the our monitoring stats for the system, I could see the memory was almost maxing out.

monitor

Logging onto the server was painfully slow, and any attempts to run Windows task manager were met with errors. It was then I discovered that the host only had 6GB, yes 6GB. It turns out the  server was an old Dell T710 tower system , re-purposed as a backup repository.

I then consulted the excellent Veeam Technical documentation, for the memory requirements for a backup repository :-http://helpcenter.veeam.com/backup/80/vsphere/system_requirements.html

Backup Repository Server

Specification

Requirement

Hardware

CPU: x86 processor (x86-64 recommended).

Memory: 4 GB RAM plus 2 GB RAM (32-bit OS) or 4 GB RAM (64-bit OS) for each concurrent job. Using more memory improves data processing performance for long chains of large backup files on backup repositories running 64-bit OS.

Disk space: 200 MB for Veeam Backup & Replication components and sufficient disk space to store backup files and replicas (high-RPM drives and RAID10 configuration recommended).

Network: 1 Gbps LAN for onsite backup and replication and 1 Mbps WAN for offsite backup and replication recommended. High latency and reasonably unstable WAN links are supported.

Resolution

As this was a Windows 2008 R2 server, at the very least it should have been running with 8GB of RAM (4GB plus 4GB for 64-bit OS). A quick look into my spares and I managed to find a spare 32GB , which was swiftly installed, and the Exchange restore job re-ran.

As you can see from the Task Manager, the job required quite a bit more than the original 6GB of RAM.

taskman

 

Moral of the story , pay attention to those requirements, they are not just random numbers plucked out of the air.