VMWare Backups Work - Client Base Fails

[rsamora]

Here's one for you, kids.

NBU 7.5.0.5 on a Windows 2008 R2 Server, most clients still running 7.5.0.3

I have a Linux FT media server that handles 2 fiber transport clients and I wanted to use it as a standard media server as well.  8 clients (MS-Windows policy) used the media server last night and all 8 failed with a Status 59, access denied.  All 8 clients are VMWare boxes so I created a VMWare policy, added the 8 clients, selected the same media server, and the backups finished successfully.  Why?

All of the clients are behind a DMZ firewall.  Those are the only DMZ clients that were being backed up through that media server with an MS-Windows policy.  MS-Windows clients on my production network don't have a problem writing to this particular media server. 

A Status 59 is typically a very easy fix.  If the 8 clients had failed using the VMWare policy, then it would have most likely pointed to a simple and obvious solution.  But why does the MS-Windows policy get "access denied" but the same clients in a VMWare policy write successfully.  I wouldn't think the firewall has anything to do with it.  Does a VMWare policy used a different set of credentials?

Thanks in advance for any light you can shed on this.

Randy

[Red_Iguana · Accepted solution]

In my experience with VMware backups Netbackup only needs access to the ESX host since it is backing up the vmdk file which is why it completed successfully. For standard backups the clients would need to allow the new media server access by adding it to the bp.conf file (unix) or the Netbackup client configuration (Windows.)

[Marianne]

I agree -VM backups are done via ESX server comms - no direct comms with clients.

Client backups need direct comms with bpcd (via pbx) on the client.

Enable bpcd log on the clients and check resulting log entries.

Status 59 is a reverse lookup issue and/or missing SERVER entry on the client.

Hope this helps!

[rsamora]

That makes perfect sense.  I forgot that each client doesn't even need NetBackup installed if it's a VMWare backup.  Thank you both for your responses.  Have a great long weekend.