I have seen many posts about this error, but most of them are for Exchange 2003 or 2007 or Windows 2003. This is happening on:
- Backup Exec 2010 R3
- Windows 2008 R2, SP1
- Exchange 2010 SP1 RU4
- Preferred Server list has passive node first
- "Let Backup Exec automatically choose ..." is enabled
- AOFO turned off
- GRT enabled
- Error happens repeatedly, but not consistently
Backup- DAGName2V-79-57344-65233 - AOFO: Initialization failure on: "\\DAGName\Microsoft Information Store\DataBase1". Advanced Open File Option used: Microsoft Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS).
Snapshot provider error (0xE000FED1): A failure occurred querying the Writer status.
Check the Windows Event Viewer for details.
Writer Name: Exchange Server, Writer ID: {76FE1AC4-15F7-4BCD-987E-8E1ACB462FB7}, Last error: The VSS Writer failed, but the operation can be retried (0x800423f3), State: Failed during prepare backup operation (7).
The VSS Writer list always shows "retryable error" for the Microsoft Exchange Replication Writer, and the condition only occurs on this database, which is the largest of 5 databases, at 500GB, and is the last DB to be backed up.
Followed all recommendations found so far: AOFO turned off, tried re-registering VSS, but a re-boot of the passive node is the only thing that works ... sometimes. Again, no consistency, not even in the failures or successes. The past 2 nightly backups failed while the previous 3 ran successfully.
Re-booting the Exchange server(s) to fix this error is ludicrous, as well as costly to our user community. Anyone have an idea of wheer/how to pursue this?
