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vSphere Data Protection (VDP) fails with the error: E10056: Restore failed due to existing snapshot (2036109)

Symptoms

When attempting to back up a virtual machine, the process fails with an error shortly after the process begins.
When you view the Task Details, you see the error:

Execution error: E10056: Restore failed due to existing snapshot. Job Id: <job-id> (Full Client Path:)
In the AvVcbImage log file (at the same time as the incident), you may see messages indicating that there are no snapshots:

XXXX-09-18 08:52:28 <VM name> Info <16001>: Found 2 disk(s), 0 snapshots, and 4 snapshot ctk files, on the VMs datastore.

Note: The AvVcbImage log file is located at:

/usr/local/avamarclient/var-proxy-N/Jobname-EPOCH-vmimagew.log
This message is followed by a message that the snapshots exist:

XXXX-09-18 08:52:28 <VM Name> Warning <16002>: Too many extra snapshot files (2) were found on the VMs datastore. This can cause a problem for the backup or restore.XXXX-09-18 08:52:28 <VM Name> FATAL <16018>: The datastore information from VMX '[VMFS_VOLUME] VM_Name/VM_Name.vmx' will not permit a restore or backup.
These messages also appear:

XXXX-09-18 08:52:28 <VM Name> Info <0000>: Starting graceful (staged) termination, Too many pre-existing snapshots will not permit a restore. (wrap-up stage) XXXX-09-18 08:52:28 <VM Name> Error <9759>: createSnapshot: snapshot creation failed

Cause

This issue occurs when there are no reported snapshots in the VMSD file and/or snapshot manager, but delta files are shown to exist in the actual file structure for the virtual machine. For example:

-rw-r--r--    1 root     root     0 Sep 24 15:40 VM_Name-000001-delta.vmdk
-rw-r--r--    1 root     root     0 Sep 24 15:32 VM_Name-000001.vmdk

Note: This may also occur when orphaned snapshots are present. The Resolution steps in this article may be used to resolve this as well.

Resolution

To resolve this issue:

Determine if the snapshots should be consolidated into the base disk.

Note: The determination process is outside the scope of this article.
Assuming that these files are no longer needed, move the delta files to a temporary directory. For example:

# mkdir old # mv VM_Name-000001*.vmdk old/
Verify that the virtual machine is in an acceptable state.
Permanently remove the files after verification.
Retry the backup process.

Note: This condition was not checked in VMware Data Recovery (VDR) and it is therefore possible that VDR was able to perform a successful backup in this situation. After upgrading however, you may see the messages listed in the Symptoms section.

Impact/Risks

The snapshot tree must be carefully followed to ensure that the delta files can be safely relocated without affecting the current state of the virtual machine. Moving a referenced delta may result in unexpected virtual machine behavior.

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