VMware agent problems - not backing up certain VMs

[RobertPBham]

Hi there,

I was wondering if someone can help. I have recently upgraded our entire Backup Exec system to 2010. We have vSphere 4 Update 1 ESXi installed on two hosts with all the latest patches installed. I have been using VMware VCB to backup 10 virtual machines across the two hosts - this creates a snapshot, takes a backup and then commits the snapshot. This has worked flawlessly for 2 years on various ESX versions including vSphere.

As VMware are removing support for VCB in the next release of vSphere I decided to purchase the VMware agent for Backup Exec. I have not been able to get a successfully backup of all of the VM's using the Backup Exec VMware agent. Out of the two full backups I have run, I receive the following error: Unable to create a snapshot of the virtual machine. The virtual machine may be too busy to quiesce to take the snapshot.

The backup is scheduled to run at 3am in the morning - the servers are quiet and no other backups are taking place. The failure occurs on a different virtual machine each time the backup has failed - all Windows Server 2003. I can take a snapshot of the affected VM's within vCenter with no issues whatsoever.

I have patched Backup Exec 2010 to the latest version including the hot fix released on the 14th May 2010.

As VCB works flawlessly, does anyone have any idea as to why the Backup Exec VMware agent is struggling? I have the VMware tools installed in all of the VM's. I am using NBD as the transport method and GRT for individual file restore - Active Directory, Exchange and SQL GRT is disabled. The backup is going to a B2D Folder and then copied to tape.

I have a feeling it will be the case of waiting for a hot fix from Backup Exec, but just wanted to check I hadn't missed anything.

Thanks for any insight
Rob

[sksujeet]

This should answer this :

http://support.veritas.com/docs/347344

[RobertPBham]

Hi Sazz,

Thanks for the response. As much as I would like to think that it is because the host or vm had reported it was unavailable or disconnected, I have vCenter configured to report heatbeat information, along with host and vm availability. I am not receiving any alerts from vCenter regarding this happening. There are also no alarms raised within vCenter at any point.

I have just created a new Backup Exec job to just backup the VM that didn't work last night - this has just completed the snapshot operation and is currently backing up. As the VM is in use by users and the snapshot is successful, something is slightly amiss somewhere. The oddity is that the problem doesn't occur on the same virtual machine, so its even harder to narrow down.

Thanks
Rob

[sksujeet]

If it works sometimes and also happens on different virutal machine the issue can be the API's that got installed while installing the AVVI license. Can you please uninstall and install the license again for the AVVI and also try to repair the BE from the add remove programs.
 

[RobertPBham · Accepted solution]

Hi Sazz,

Thanks for all your help - I didn't try what you suggested as I had a couple of other things I wanted to try first, and I've managed to get it to work. These were the three things I changed and I'm not sure which one fixed it - it may have been all, but I'm posting here in case anyone else has an issue.

I removed the AOFO agent from all of the VM's that had it installed as I was reading this is not required anymore as Windows Server 2003 uses VSS by default. I only had the RAWS agent installed.

I created a new account within Active Directory and assigned this vCenter Administrator privileges at the Data Center level. This was used as the account to connect to the vCenter to do the backup and was specified in the job.

I moved the vCenter backup to the bottom of the selection list so that all of the other backup routines had completed first before trying to do the vSphere backup.

I now have successful VMware vSphere backups!