Backup Exec 2010 R3 with VMWare Incremental Backups

[JackOfSpades]

Hello Support Forums!

So I've talked with Symantec Support and they've helped me create a new policy fro backing up VMWare Server VMDK files (both full and incremental). After the tech helped me set them up, he said to notify him of any issues after the backups complete. The following morning, my backup had 'Completed with Exceptions'. I emailed the tech about the exceptions and he told me that they are purely 'cosmetic' and nothing to worry about.

Well backups are a pretty important part of the business so I thought I might share the exceptions with you and see if anyone else had a more solid answer for me. Here are the three exceptions:

V-79-57344-38726  - Backup Exec failed to connect to virtual machine 'DC1' and was unable to collect the necessary metadata to restore individual application items. You cannot perform GRT-enabled restores of application data from this backup.

V-79-57344-38727  - Same error as above

V-79-57344-38728  - The SQL database on virtual machine 'VMServer' is configured to maintain transaction logs backups are not being performed. Not backing up the transaction log results in the log growing in size until it fills all available disk space. You should either schedule regular log backups or change the database to the simple recovery mode

So if anyone has some info on these errors and whether or not they're truly 'cosmetic', I'd appreciate it.If they really are nothing to worry about and will be fixed in future updates, that would be great too. Just thought I'd run it by more than one tech. Thanks!

Running Backup Exec 2010 R3 on dedicated server / Running VMWare vCenter 4.1 ESXi

[teiva-boy]

Costmetic yes to a degree.

You can restore the entire VMDK as needed if you needed to.

However, you wouldn't be able to restore AD objects out of the VMDK, and there is a possible misconfiguration in the SQL backup within the VMDK with SQL installed on it.

That said, uncheck the GRT features for AD, and try again.  That error should clear.  Or if you are licensed for it, troubleshoot it further by ensuring that a Remtoe Agent for Windows is installed in the guest, and that VMware tools has the VSS provider removed.

For SQL, change the settings as directed via SQL Management settings.  

[pkh]

For your first two errors, see the following document

http://www.symantec.com/business/support/index?page=content&id=TECH125883

If you don't correct the error, then you cannot do ANY GRT restore using your vmdk backup, not just the AD.  You would have to restore the entire VM.  Did you install the RAWS in those machines?

For your last error, you should schedule another job to backup the SQL transaction logs and truncate them.  When BE backs up a SQL database, it does not truncate the logs and they will keep growing.

Before your change the recovery mode to Simple, you should check with your application people first.  They may require the logs to do point-in-time restores.