Application aware backups with persistent guest agent fails after v13 upgrade

[RagnarJoensen]

Hi,

We recently upgrade our Veeam Backup & Replication from v12 to v13 (13.0.1.1071) and suddenly experienced a lot of VM backups were failing. Case #08010047

After investigating multiple log files, where most of the errors seemed to point and ssl or handshake errors. The issue revealed itself in the backup logs on the backup server, looking like this.

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Couldn't link Physical Host 06927f76-4fe0-47de-b630-37c614afcb23 to BObject 01dd32db-e6a4-4146-a5f4-20802496aff9, as Physical Host is already linked to 33606187-7375-4556-856f-8551ea881512

I located the issue to be that multiple VMs have identical BIOS UUID and this UUID is used to uniquely identify VMs. You can see the ID by running this inside the VM

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Get-CimInstance Win32_ComputerSystemProduct | Select-Object UUID

or or by querying SCVMM with

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(Get-SCVirtualMachine -Name "VM-Name").BiosGuid

I raised a case #08010047 with Veeam to see if my findings are correct. And to know if this is intentional or not, as I cannot seem to find any information regarding this in the Veeam HyperV documentation. Also in my opinion the BIOS UUID is a bad way of uniquely identifying a VM.

Solution
1. Disable "use persistent guest agent" the VM backs up just fine, if the necessary extra ports required for this are open.
2. Shutdown VM. Generate a new BIOS UUID. Power on the VM and install the Veeam deployment kit (don´t know if the entire veeam deployment kit is necessary, but it isn´t enough to just reinstall the veeaminstaller, and i didn´t test more options)