Virtual disk volume not supporting GRT for one day - again

[Artegic]

My previous thread about this got locked, so I'm starting a new one:

Every once in a while, one of the jobs on my BackupExec 2012 media server backing VMware VMs with GRT reports, for one of the VMs:

V-79-57344-38725 - Ein oder mehrere virtuelle Datenträger enthalten Datenträger, die Granular Recovery Technology (GRT) nicht unterstützten. Für diese Datenträger können keine selektiven Wiederherstellungen ausgeführt werden. 

Translation: One or more virtual storage media contain storage media that did not support GRT. For those storage media no selective restores can be performed.

On the next run, the same VM will usually back up just fine again. The VMs for which this happens vary across the whole set. Indeed, on the last three backup runs, I had two different VMs reporting this problem, ie. one did not support GRT on the incremental backups Wednesday and Thursday but did on the full backup Friday night, while another one did support GRT on Wednesday and Thursday but not on Friday, and both of these didn't see any problem supporting GRT on Tuesday.

On my last posting I got the recommendation to open a support case should this happen again, but that's always extremely time-consuming and frankly I don't see how it might lead anywhere as Symantec support, in my experience, needs problems to be reliably reproducible in order to investigate them.

[lmosla]

Hi Artegic,

please post the troubleshooting steps that you have already done. For instance is the Media Server and remote agent updated to the latest version through running live updates and pushing the remote agent to the remote servers? Also, are you getting any Window Event errors when the failing job runs?

[Artegic]

Hi lmosla,

last time I looked, the media server and remote agents were up to date wrt live update, and I have pushed all remote agents after the last update. Right now I cannot check because when I try to run the Live Update command I get an error message:

"Symantec LiveUpdate is not installed. Planned updates for Backup Exec cannot be downloaded without LiveUpdate. To plan updates you must install LiveUpdate again."

In the event log of the server that didn't support GRT on 2014-08-20 and 2014-08-21 there are these errors one minute before the backup starts each night:

Event ID 137/Ntfs
The transaction resource manager could not be started on volume "\\?\Volume{8d301e82-1eb3-11e4-a453-0050569760c4}" because of a non-repeatable error.

Event ID 12289/VSS
Volume shadow copy service error: unexpected error "DeviceIoControl(\\?\fdc#generic_floppy_drive#6&3b4c39bd&1&0#{53f5630d-b6bf-11d0-94f2-00a0c91efb8b} - 0000000000000540,0x00560000,0000000000000000,0,000000000042DE20,4096,[0])". hr = 0x80070001, illegal function.

Please note those appear every night, regardless whether the backup does or doesn't produce the "GRT not supported" warning.

The server that didn't support GRT on 2014-08-22 shows this error sporadically throughout the event log:

Event ID 8003/MRxSmb
The main search service received a server announcement from computer x which seems to be the domains main search service ...

One occurrence of this falls into the backup run that ended up reporting the "GRT not supported" warning.

Thanks,
Tilman (Artegic)

[lmosla]

Check out the following and see if it is applicable http://virtuallyhyper.com/2012/05/quiesced-snapshots-failing-windows-2008-r2-vms/