The job failed with the following error: A communications failure has occurred with a Virtual Machine resource.

[JMRZFB]

Hi there,

Please I need your help to solved the error in title for Backup Exec.

All agent are installed on each virtual machine and the VMware Management

All jobs runs without error except the Virtual Machine Backup.

Thank you for your assistance.

Backup - Server_Name1_BackupExec
V-79-57344-65304 - The Virtual Machine resource is not responding. Backup set canceled.
V-79-57344-65304 - The Virtual Machine resource is not responding. Backup set canceled.
Remote Agent not detected on Server_Name2_VMWare_Management

[samueljn]

- What is the version of BE?

- Is it failing on a particular Virtual machine or all the VM?

- Is there any non windows server included in the backup selection?

- Do you have GRT enabled on this backup job?

- Is Remote agent for windows installed on all the VM?

- What is the version of ESX?

[JMRZFB]

Hi,

Please see below the response for your question and thank you for your assistance.

Kind regards,

- What is the version of BE? BE 2010 - Media server V13.0 rev 2896 (32bits)

- Is it failing on a particular Virtual machine or all the VM? It is failing for all VM

- Is there any non windows server included in the backup selection? All servers are Windows (2003 - 2008)

- Do you have GRT enabled on this backup job? No GRT enable

- Is Remote agent for windows installed on all the VM? remote agent installed on all VM

- What is the version of ESX? ESX 4

[pkh]

You should upgrade to BE 2010 R3 which is the latest version and contains a lot of fixes for the AVVI agent.   Your existing licence keys will work.  You can download BE 2010 R3 from either the fileconnect site or www.backupexec.com. After your upgrade, do not forget to run LiveUpdate a couple of time to update it to SP1 and the latest hotfixes.

After you have upgraded to R3, push out the remote agent again.

Note that BE 2010 uses the vStorage API to backup VMware VM's and this API only comes with the paid version of ESX.

[samueljn]

The error message you posted is not the actual error. In the job log you will see another error: May be similar to,

0xe000ff18 - A communications failure has occurred (or)

0xe0009574 - Unable to create a snapshot of the virtual machine

• If the first one has occurred, check if the Remote agent service has crashed on the media server in the Event viewer
• If the snapshot error has occurred, check if you are able to create a snapshot in the Vsphere through Snapshot manager
• If a snapshot is successfull, check if the account used in BE has administrator rights in Vsphere

If none of this helped, attach the latest failed job log.

[JMRZFB]

Hi,

Thank you for your prompt response. The error is 0xe000ff18. I have checked the Event viewer but no error with Remote agent service. The account used in BE have admin right in Vsphere and all VM.

Please see the log and thank you for your help.

Kind regards,

[all2surreal]

Hi. I've been having a very similar problem like this too. We updated to BackUp Exec 2012 when it was released back in March, and at the same time we got the license for AVVI. Now for the past two months we've been backing up our VMware Virtual Center every Saturday morning with all of the servers underneath it. There are thirty servers, two are 2003, four are Win7, and the rest are 2008. Since that time the job has intermittently worked either 100% of the time or failed on a server, which then incidentally fails the entire job and no more servers get backed up. When the job fails it fails at either of two points: when it is at 98% of taking the snapshot it will just hang and not move any further, or when it completes the snapshot but cannot clean it up. Also, this failure causes the remote agent service on the media server to stop. In either case I have to log in to the virtual center and delete the snapshot on the server which the job failed on, and then restart the service on the media server. Then if I rerun the job it will either work or fail. I have very little confidence in the AVVI backup jobs because of this problem. All VMs are running the most current version of the RAWS agent. GRT is enabled in the backup job. We are using VMware Virtual Center version 4.1

Any help here would be greatly appreciated. All the knowledge base says to do for this error is to clean up the snapshot and try the job again. I have to believe there is something else that can be done here. Thanks, Adam

See screenshots of this past weekend’s failure. One is of the job log and the other is the event log in the Virtual Center for which the job failed on the server.