Can’t remove standalone host from Veeam Backup & Replication 7 (Used in Job)

I was attending the Veeam Certified Engineer course this week and tried some things in my home lab. One of the discussions in the course was, if it’s possible to add a ESXi Hypervisor to Veeam Backup & Replication. From my view it should be possible to add it and use it as a replication target.
I deployed an ESXi from a template, add a datastore for the replicas and added it to the VBR server. Afterwards I created a Replication Job to replicate VM-1 from my production ESX to the ESXi Hypervisor (Free license).
This job failed with the following error message:
Processing configuration Error: Current license or ESXi version prohibits execution of the requested operation.
veeam_failed_02
So you can add a vSphere Hypervisor host to the VBR server but you can’t use it for Backup or Replication because you need the vStorage API.
I decided to delete the Replication Job and the standalone host but I got the following error when I tried to delete the host after the job was deleted:
veeam_failed_01
That was interesting because I deleted the job so there shouldn’t be a job anymore. So the only way to get rid of this “ghost” job was to edit the Veeam B&R database.
I would think that the following procedure is not supported by Veeam.
Open SQL Management Studio and log into the server
Go under Veeam Database – Tables
Right click Backup.Model.Backups and select “Select Top 1000 rows“, there you will find the missing Job with a job_id of NULL
If you try to delete this row you get an error which states that there is a REFERENCE contraint in the table Backup.Model.Points.
Before you open this table write down the id of the missing job
veeam_failed_rep_01
Delete in the table Backup.Model.Points the row with the matching backup_id value
veeam_failed_rep_02
After you have deleted both rows you can delete the standalone host within the VBR server.
veeam_failed_rep_03
To verify that this will only happen when you use the free license I put an Essentials license in the ESXi host. I created the Replication Job and it successfully completed.
Then I deleted the Replication Job and tried to delete the standalone host but I got the same error message as with the free license. I searched for the replicated VM in the VBR server, right clicked on it and selected “Remove from disk”. After this procedure I was able to delete the standalone host.
Looks like that there is a little bug in Veeam Backup & Replication 7 Update 3 when you try to use a free licensed ESXi host.
 

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