Forum Discussion

ANURAG2840's avatar
ANURAG2840
Level 3
5 years ago

NetBackup VM Backup

Hi, The backup of few VM servers are getting failed if the VMTools services are running on the server. The quiescing option is enabled for all the VM backups.   
8
Windows Server 2008 R2
  • Lowell_Palecek's avatar
    Lowell_Palecek
    5 years ago

    You don't have to reinstall NetBackup. There's an installation program called "Veritas VSS Provider for vSphere" in NetBackup\bin\goodies. If you run it, it will reinstall the Veritas provider, and NetBackup will use the Veritas provider rather than the VMware provider.

    I think there's a way in the VMware Tools console to tell whether their VSS Provider is in place. I haven't checked in a long time.

    You can tell from the application event log on the VM that the Veritas VSS provider is used in your VMware backup. You should see events for it starting and stopping. It may still have one of the old names in the event log.

sdo's avatar
sdo
Moderator
5 years ago

ANURAG2840 apologies, but I didn't quite understand, plus you didn't really give us much to go on.  Please can you take a little more time to restate the problem, and please also provide error output.  Thank you.

  • ANURAG2840's avatar
    ANURAG2840
    Level 3
    5 years ago

    HI SDO

    The query is that in order to take a quiesced VM backup the VMTools services call the VSS services of the host. If the VMTools services are running on the host, few VM backups are getting failed (4 to 5). Stopping the VMTools on these hosts allow the VM backups to complete successfully. The VMBackups of all other server are going as usual with both the VMTools and VSS services running simultaneously.

     

    • sdo's avatar
      sdo
      Moderator
      5 years ago

      My understanding was that having VMTools installed and working and running was a requirement for clean VSS aware backups.

      IMO stopping or killing VMTools simply to overcome an unwanted error, and to thus "appear" to achieve a clean backup, is not a good move.  It is all actually meant to work together.  If there was no need for VMTools then it wouldn't even exist.  Personally, I wouldn't trust that your now supposedly working backups are actually safe.  Yes, you might be able to restore test, and the restore might appear to work once, the restore test might even appear to work ten times in a row, or a hundred times in a row, but can you ever be truely sure that it always is clean when you stop VMTools, that it always will be clean when you stop VMTools?

      At the end of the day the question will always be... Was the backup actually taken in a supported scenario?  I'm not sure that I'd like to be in a situation explaining to the customer why their restores didn't actually work when they came to actually use them...

      You:  Oh, yeah, we kill/stop VMTools when we have snapshot failures.

      Customer:  Did the vendor authorise/approve you to do that?

    • X2's avatar
      X2
      Moderator
      5 years ago

      ANURAG2840so I understand that some of your VMs are failing backup. And "stopping" the VMTools service on these guests allows the backup to run succesfully.

      If the above is correct, it still does not give enough information for anyone to help you. (if I understood incorrectly, then you still haven't detailed the problem correctly).

      You can at least give details of the backup policy you use (which options you are using to configure the VMware policy) and attach the details of the failed job. You need to help us to help you.