@Forza Too funny. I came across this post and clicked on the URL you referenced......and that earlier question was from me!

Well, nothing has changed. I'm doing mirror'ed backups and I'm still blind as a bat.

@olivierlambert Hi Olivier. I'll see what I can do. I've spent the weekend cleaning up my backups and catching up on mirror transfers. Once completed, I'll do a few custom backups at various nconnect values.

@andrewperry I have support with XOA so will create a ticket.

@acomav Replying to myself again. After working for a few days, the issue restarted. I'll raise a ticket.

@olivierlambert
I can confirm it was my side. I had to do a few things to get the VMware Virtual disks to free up empty space and once I did, the VM Import to XCP-NG to an NFS SR successfully copied the virtual disk in a thin mode.
For anyone reading this who will be preparing to jump ship off VMware.

I am using vSphere 6.7. I have not tested against vSphere 7 yet. Not bothering with vSphere 8 for obvious reasons. My VM was a CentOS 7 VM with LVM to manage the 3 virtual disks.

1. Make sure you Virtual Hardware is at least version 11. My test VM was a very old one still on version 8.
2. For the ESXi host the VM lives on (but you should probably go all hosts in the cluster), go into Advanced settings, and enable (change 0 to 1) VMFS3.EnableBlockDelete. I thought I had this enabled but only 2 of the 5 hosts in the cluster did. You may need to check this is not reset after updates.
3. Due to using CentOS 7 (perhaps) I could not used 'fstrim' with the discard mount option. It was not supported. I filled up the diskspace with zeros, synced, and then removed the zeroes.

# cd /mount point; dd if=/dev/zero of=./zeroes bs=1M count=1024; sync; rm zeroes

Change count=1024 (Which will create 1 GB of zeroes in a file) to however big a file you require to nearly fill up the partition / volume. eg count=10240 will make a 10 GB file.
Windows users can use 'sdelete'.

I could have waited for vSphere to automatically clean up the datastore in the background at this stage, but I was impatient and 'storage motioned' the virtual disks to NFS storage in Thin mode. I confirmed only the used space was copied across. I then migrated the disks back to my HP Nimble SAN and retained thin provisioning.

@olivierlambert Hi.
The disk sizes (and vmdk file size) are 150GB and 170GB. Both are in a Volume group and one Logical Volume using 100% of the Volume group mounted using XFS.

Disk space in use is 81%:

# pvs
  PV         VG         Fmt  Attr PSize    PFree
  /dev/sda2  centos     lvm2 a--   <15.51g    0 
  /dev/sdb   VolGroup01 lvm2 a--  <150.00g    0 
  /dev/sdc   VolGroup01 lvm2 a--  <170.00g    0 

# vgs
  VG         #PV #LV #SN Attr   VSize   VFree
  VolGroup01   2   1   0 wz--n- 319.99g    0 
  centos       1   2   0 wz--n- <15.51g    0

# lvs
  LV        VG         Attr       LSize   Pool Origin Data%  Meta%  Move Log Cpy%Sync Convert
  IMAPSpool VolGroup01 -wi-ao---- 319.99g 

# df -h
/dev/mapper/VolGroup01-IMAPSpool  320G  257G   64G  81% /var/spool/imap

The vmdk files live on an HPE/Nimble CS3000 (Block iscsi). I am now thinking I will need to get into the VM and free up discarded/deleted blocks....which would make the vmdk sizes smaller. (as they are set to thin provisioned with vmfs)
I'll do that and retry and report back if I see the the full disk being written out to XCP-NG.

@acomav

Import completed. Great work @florent.

I spoke too soon. The issue has returned the following day which means it is most likely the nightly backups triggering the issue.

Just an update here that Vates were able to fix my pool. I assume they used the script that was just uploaded so if any one is wondering the impact, it should be fine.

@andrewperry I have support with XOA so will create a ticket.

I have just started having this issue on one Pool yet 5 other pools are fine.
Running XOA 6.2.2.

@Forza Too funny. I came across this post and clicked on the URL you referenced......and that earlier question was from me!

Well, nothing has changed. I'm doing mirror'ed backups and I'm still blind as a bat.

@olivierlambert
Hi,

Yes, I have "Merge backups synchronously" enabled on the Local Backups jobs but still get the error as the Mirror Job has a lock on the VM data.

Error/Message:
"the writer IncrementalRemoteWriter has failed the step writer.beforeBackup() with error Lock file is already being held. It won't be used anymore in this job execution."
Start: 2025-07-26 21:17
End: 2025-07-26 21:17
Duration: a few seconds
Error: Lock file is already being held

Thanks.

I am using XOA 5.106.2, I have a large incremental mirror backup running between my primary backup NFS and a remote NFS Remote. Apart from the task in the Backup tab saying it has started, there is no progress information in Tasks, so I have nothing to view on the status.
It is very frustrating as I don't know how long the job has left. My current job has been running two days. I can confirm from the XOA command line with 'journalctl -f -u xo-server.service' that merges occasionally happen, but what about the actual transfer of data? The Remote NFS has IO load and it is updating the files in the directories for the Mirror-ed data.
Do I need to look at a different log? Is there any way to see this information in XOA? I thought I read over a year ago that this was to be fixed in XOA 6 but I cannot find any reference to that any more in Google searches or this Forum.
I can't run backups against the two VMs being mirrored as I get the 'lock error'.

Before I open a support ticket I thought I would ask here. Can I view the progress/current status of a running Mirror Incremental backup job in the GUI? Do I need to enable some debugging manually?

@Danp Interesting. That will be it. Thanks for linking this.
In the mean time, I've put in a request with the Australian government to move us closer to Europe.

@olivierlambert

I am in Australia.

I was able to fix it in mine by disabling IPv6. (Which we don't run).

sudo sysctl -w net.ipv6.conf.all.disable_ipv6=1
sudo sysctl -w net.ipv6.conf.default.disable_ipv6=1
In order to verify that IPv6 is disabled, run:

cat /proc/sys/net/ipv6/conf/all/disable_ipv6
If the output is 1, we can say IPv6 is in disable state.

This is a temp fix until next reboot. Read here for a permanent solution:

https://bobcares.com/blog/debian-12-disable-ipv6/

After disabling IPv6, 'xoa check' immediately started working.