I've been gradually working on isolating an error that occurs sometimes (not all the time) on my backups. We're running BE 12.5 and I have updated BE to SP2 and all the latest hotfixes. I have also rolled out updated BE Agent software to all servers involved in the backup. This is an example of the errors I am getting:
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Job Completion Status
Job ended: Wednesday, 24 June 2009 at 1:10:15 AM
Completed status: Failed
Final error: 0xe000fe30 - A communications failure has occurred.
Final error category: Server Errors
For additional information regarding this error refer to link V-79-57344-65072
Errors
Click an error below to locate it in the job log
Backup- \\grvweb\WebWiz V-79-57344-65072 - The connection to target system has been lost. Backup set canceled.
Exceptions
Click an exception below to locate it in the job log
Backup- \\grvweb\WebWiz V-79-57344-34108 - An unexpected error occurred when cleaning up Symantec Volume Snapshot Provider (VSP) snapshots. Make sure that no other application has a lock on the cache files created by the snapshot operation.
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The server that is failing is GRVWEB. The details of this server are interesting ... it is Windows Server 2000 ... and it is running as a VMWARE virtual server which is running on another server (GRVWEB1) which runs Windows Server 2003. So to summarise:
GRVWEB1 runs Windows Server 2003 and VMWARE software and virtual of GRVWEB.
GRVWEB runs Windows Server 2000 and is a VMWARE virtual.
In researching the error messages, I learned that the most likely cause was some problem with anti-virus software. GRVWEB (the virtual server) does not run any anti-virus software. GRVWEB1 (the host server) does run Symantec Endpoint Protection. I have configured it so that the folder where the virtual disk images are stored is not being scanned by SEP.
I also experimented with AOFO. We are using AOFO for our backups, configured as "Automatic" selection of provider. It uses VSS on the host server (Windows 2003) and that works fine. It automatically selects the Symantec VSP for GRVWEB, which is right, given that it is a Windows Server 2000 machine ... but obviously something is still going horribly wrong somewhere in that process. I've tried turning off AOFO altogether, but then I get all sorts of other issues with open files on my other servers.
Last thing I have tried to change is to set it so that the backup uses Windows Shares on the GRVWEB virtual server. This seems to have reduced the frequency of the errors, but has not eliminated them altogether.
I was wondering if anyone had any further suggestions, as I am at my wits end. I would like to upgrade GRVWEB to Windows Server 2003, but that's not an option for me just at the moment. I was thinking of using Windows Shares to back it up, but uninstalling the BE Agent from GRVWEB. Would it still back up the data, even without an agent installed?