Agent for VMware not backing up vmdk.

[kkoekkoek]

I am running backup exec 2012 sp3 with the agent for vmware installed. I can add my vcenter server and see all of my virtual machines. When I select a virtual machine it shows all associated .vmdk files as selected but when the backup completes (it says successfully) it is only 22KB and it says it didn't backup any virtual disks. Has anybody seen this before?

[CraigV]

Hi,

What sort of disks are these? RDM? Or normal disks presented from a datastore?

If RDM then you can't back them up and would have to backup the VM using the RAWS agent instead.

Thanks!

[kkoekkoek]

They are normal disks presented from a datastore. We have multiple datastores if that matters. Thanks for the quick reply.

[w-d]

Can you check what is the version of vmware and how many disk this vmware machine has?

Is this problem present with other vmware machines as well?

[kkoekkoek]

Vcenter and the ESX hosts are all running 5.5 oh and it does it for every VM on the server. We even have a ESX server not connecting into the vcenter box and it does the same thing

[William_Donigan]

Hello,

Can you verify that the account you are using to backup your VMware environment has the following permissions per the following tech document -"http://www.symantec.com/docs/TECH129645".

Does this issue still occur if you add the ESX host to Backup Exec and backup using the ESX root account?

Also verify that the vStorage API license has been added.

[kkoekkoek]

The backup account has administrator rights on the vcenter box as well as the administrator role in vcenter.

Issue still occurs with the root login when connecting to the ESX host directly

and the storage API license is there

If I watch from vcenter I can see it take a snapshot and remove the snapshot but backup exec doesn't seem to copy over the data

[William_Donigan]

Check the HOSTD log on the ESX host for any errors; you can find the location of it by following this VMware KB article-"kb.vmware.com/kb/2032076".

If you do find any errors compare them with the developer api error codes listed here-"https://www.vmware.com/support/developer/vix-api/vix112_reference/errors/errors.html"

If you see that the HOSTD log is clean; enable VMware logging per the following tech document-"http://www.symantec.com/docs/TECH63926", re-ruin the backup job and open a support case with us. You can find the contact information here -"http://www.symantec.com/business/support/index?page=contactsupport&key=15047"

[kkoekkoek]

Nothing suspicious in the hostd log.

We are just in the progress of upgrading to 2012 and the backup exec server in question was upgraded from 2010 R3 so I thought I'd spin up a new 2012 box from scratch and see how that went and it backs things up without problem with all the same credentials.

I've had a ticket open with symantec for three weeks now and they are no further ahead on this than I am.