Backup Exec turning off Virtual Machines

[Leon_Baradat]

We're running BackupExec 2012 R3 on a Server 2008 physical box. Most of our other servers are running as VMs on a pair of Hyper-V machines (Server 2012) that replicate to one another.  We have AOFO turned on and set to Automatically select open file technology.

We recently upgraded those Hyper-V machines to bigger ones with SSD arrays, doing Planned Failovers of the servers from the old to the new hypervisors. The VMs are running fine on the new system, except that now, when BE backs them up, it turns them off!  We didn't make any changes to our backup jobs, except make sure their selection lists are pointed to the right place

The Exceptions section of the Job Log shows the following (with server name redacted):

• AOFO: Initialization failure on: “\\********\D:”. Advanced Open File Option

used: Microsoft Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS).

V-79-10000-11217 – VSS Snapshot error. The Microsoft Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS) snapshot failed. Make sure that all provider services and tasks are running. Check the Windows Event Viewer for details.

What in the world do I do about this? I've searched the Web for solutions but haven't found anything helpful so far.

[Colin_Weaver]

If the bigger machines means vhd/vhdx fiels that are bigger than 1TB then I'd start by going it a newer version of Backup Exec - Backup Exec 2012 would almost certainly have issues with larger vhd(x) sizes with the full support being on a newer version (and you are 2 versions out of date and will soon be 3 behind) - that said you may have issues in Hyper-V itself as a BE backup job should not cause a VM shutdown

There might also be a problem with the BE server not running at least the same OS level as the Hyper-V hosts (although I think that usually just means no GRT support and should not cause a VM shutdown)

[Leon_Baradat]

Hm, well...one of the machines I was testing this morning, which shut down, is half a TB in size.

I thought this issue might be because our new hypervisor machines weren't activated yet, but I activated them this morning and reran my test...and one of the two has shut down so far.

We put BE 2012 on a Server 2008 machine because (at least when we did it), BE 2012 wasn't supported on Server 2012.  Clearly we could get around this by upgrading to BE 15, which we are planning to do--but we have some other things going on, and for the moment I'm hoping to get BE 2012 working right.  I still can't fathom what would cause BE to suddenly start shutting down our servers like this, when all we did was migrate them to a different set of hypervisors running the same OS.

[Colin_Weaver]

I am not aware of 500gb drives having a problem and if the Hyper-Visor is the same version ia before and it was working then to be honest it sounds like the issue is within Hyper-V and just triggered by the backup.

Have you checked the configs of the hyper visor itself and also looked at the Hyper-VMMS event logs?