I recently had some problems with some VMs brefly freezing during snapshot removal. As described in this VMware KB article, using VADP libraries with HotAdd method can cause this issue. Even if my storage is iSCSI and not NFS, nonetheless the tests I did by forcing a proxy to run in network mode made the problem disappear.

I had to configure the proxy to run in network mode to do our tests, since in the interface this is the only place where you can change this setting:

But what if you want all your backups to run in automatic selecton, and create a specific job to save those problematic VMs in network mode? At the moment, there is no real solution for this. It would be a nice enhancement for future Veeam release, and I think is not too complicated since right now a proxy can already failover to network mode.

Anyway, right now you have some workarounds, depending on your situation:

– deploy another proxy, configure Network mode instead of Automatic Selection, and then assign to it the job containing those VMs. This is by far the best and fastest solution. Cons are you have to deploy another VM, with another Windows license (unless you use an existing VM just to run this job), and since this proxy is always running in network mode only, it has little use in running other jobs since its performances are worse than other proxies running in direct san or hotadd. You will have to configure your Veeam infrastructure to try and avoid to use this proxy for other jobs.

– try to keep Veeam proxy and the problematic VM on the same ESXi host. The problems seems to appear only when proxy and VM are not on the same host. This is easy to do if you can force the job to run always on the same proxy, and you do not have too much VMs to backup in network mode. In more complex environments, you cannot afford to run several Veeam proxies or all the problematic VMs all on the same host, and also DRS can change this situation (disabling DRS on these VMs only for backup purposes is not a good design).

– Use a Powershell script to:
— reconfigure a proxy to run in network mode only
— run the backup job on this proxy so it will use network mode
— reconfigure the proxy for the previous method

You can do this if this job can be run outside of the usual backup window, otherwise this change will impact all the jobs running on that proxy, and is not anyway an easy task.