backup VM's on single ESXi 5.5 host

[JosVerhallen]

Hi,

i am trying to back-up 3 VM's on a single VMWare ESXi 5.5 host with Symantec Backup Exec 2012 SP4. i have created seperate jobs for the 3 virtual machines which backup the data to disk and then duplicate to tape. Every backup to disk job now instantly fails with the following error:

V-79-57344-38260 - Unable to create a snapshot of the virtual machine. The virtual machine may be to...

If i check the VMWare ESXi host when i start the back-up i see the following event: "Find entity by inventory path", which succeeds.
after this event the back-up job just fails. It does not even attempt to create a Virtual Machine Snapshot on the ESXi host.

how can i fix this?

Regards,

Jos Verhallen

[pkh]

Push out the remote agent again to the VM's and try again.

[Colin_Weaver]

I take it your ESX host is licensed (from VMware not Symantec) for vStorage Backup API activity?

[JosVerhallen]

We have pushed out the remote agent again and we are still getting the same error.

[JosVerhallen]

Yes our ESXi host is licensed. 

VMware vSphere 5 Hypervisor Licensed for 2 physical CPUs (unlimited cores per CPU)

[EyeintheSky]

Silly question, but can you take a snapshot of the guestVM from within VmWare?

[JosVerhallen]

Yes we can snapshot the machines from VMWare

[pkh]

BTW, are you using ESXi 5.5 Update 1? If so, then it is not supported

[JosVerhallen]

We are using ESXi 5.5.0, 1623387

[pkh · Accepted solution]

This is ESXi 5.5 Update 1. See the build number in the release note below https://www.vmware.com/support/vsphere5/doc/vsphere-esxi-55u1-release-notes.html

[JosVerhallen]

yeah we also found out this customer uses the free ESXi license so no Vstorage API.