V-79-57344-38743 "BE Server cannot backup itself when installed on a VM" - huh?

[Artegic]

A week ago, one of my backup jobs backing up VMs from my VMware cluster started reporting this error at the end of every run:

V-79-57344-38743 - Ein Backup Exec-Server kann kein Backup von sich selbst durchführen, wenn er auf einer virtuellen Maschine installiert ist.

Literal translation: "A Backup Exec server cannot perform a backup of itself when it is installed on a virtual machine."

Which may be so, but leaves some interesting questions:

1. Why is it telling me that?
2. Why is this an error?
3. Why wasn't this a problem until a week ago?

This is Backup Exec 2012 SP4, installed on a physical Windows 2008 R2 server, not a VM.

The job in question is backing up a couple of VMs from an ESXi 5.5 cluster (without GRT.) It does not back up the Backup Exec server itself.

According to the job log all selected VMs except one are backed up without a problem. The missing VM's name doesn't even appear anywhere in the log. It's a Linux VM so it couldn't possibly be a Backup Exec server even if I wanted it to. A week ago it was still backed up fine, and nothing has been changed on it since then.

Ideas?

[VJware]

Does any of the VMs have a name as localhost ?

If the Linux VM is excluded from this backup job, does the backup complete successfully ?

[Artegic]

Hello VJware,

thanks for the quick reply.

The Linux VM is in fact an appliance called APC PowerChute Network Shutdown 3.1 for VMware. The name of the VM in vCenter is ZAGUSVMGT01, and that's also the name Backup Exec reported in its log on 2014-08-25, which was the last time it successfully backed up that VM. Its internal Linux hostname displayed when connecting to the Linux console (which one isn't supposed to do) is however indeed localhost.

Excluding the VM from the selection allowed the backup to complete successfully, except for the warning about the changed selection of course.

I forgot to mention that between the last successful backup of the VM and the first failure there was an unplanned reboot of the Backup Exec media server which interrupted the backup job in question. The job was logged with "Job status: recovered", restarted, and immediately failed with error 80004005 "fixed point restart cannot be applied to the newly started backup job." The following regular run was the first to exhibit the V-79-57344-38743 / E0009757 error.

Thanks,
Tilman

[VJware · Accepted solution]

Does recreating the backup job help ?

Alternatively, are you able to backup this Linux VM as part of a separate non-GRT backup job ?

If not, I would recommend to log a formal support case so that we can review the logs and figure out what's going wrong.

[Artegic]

Tried to back up the VM in a fresh job all by its own and got the same error.

Have put that problem on my queue of issues to open support cases for.

Thanks,

Tilman (artegic)