VEEAM Backup Server resets itself intermittently

[mightybob]

Hi,

I am running VEEAM 4.1.1 and I am finding that intermittently the server itself (which is a VM) will reboot during a backup job.

The basic setup of my VM environment is this:

2 x Dell R710 Servers
2 x Cisco 2960G switches
1 x Dell MD3000i SAN

The way VEEAM is configured is like this:

It is installed on our vCenter Server which is a W2K3 32Bit Server with 4 cores and 4GB of Ram. It accesses the MD3000i SAN directly via the iSCSI initiator setup with the proper drivers supplied from DELL (not the standard multipath driver that comes with the initiator). All backup jobs access the SAN in this manner.

All jobs are configured so they access the SAN to perform the backup.

What I see when looking at my backup server (which is also my VC server) is that sometimes when the job kicks off it will take a snapshot of the target VM then wait about 5 minutes before the VEEAM server resets itself.

Going into the VEEAM server after the reboot and looking at event manager reveals nothing fantastic, it just tells you that it has recovered from an unexpected shutdown. The only useful thing I could find in the VEEAMBackupService logs are:

"[26.07.2010 17:28:29] <07> Info Job result: Job has failed unexpectedly"

FYI I have raised a support call and will work with the technicians in getting this sorted but thought I would post on here as well to see if anyone else has had similar issues. If a resolution is found I will update with the resolution too.

[Vitaliy S.]

Hello,

Since you're running Veeam Backup and Replication in the VM, I would recommend you to switch to Virtual Appliance backup mode, as I think this issue may be related to iSCSI initiator drivers. If you still have those intermittent reboots, I would also look through VMware log files which can be found at the same datastore where VM is located. But keep working with our technical support team.

Thanks!

[Gostev]

This is known issue which is reflected in the Release Notes document (also included with your download). Thanks!

• Virtualized Veeam Backup server using Microsoft iSCSI Software Initiator for iSCSI storage access may crash or reset while running VMware vStorage API “SAN” mode job due to interoperability issues with iSCSI Initiator. To avoid the issue, use Windows 2008 or later for Veeam Backup VM, or create Veeam Backup VM with IDE virtual disks.

[tsightler]

We actually see this probably occasionally on our physical Veeam server that is using hardware Qlogic iSCSI HBA's. It's fairly rare (maybe once every 2-3 months) but is an annoyance.

[Gostev]

Tom, do you also have Windows 2003? Next time this happens, please forward us the crash dump. One of our developers is really good at troubleshooting these kind of issues, he will be able to say what exactly is causing this. He spent much time investigating the original problem, and has a very clear understanding of it (or so he says ).

[tsightler]

Actually, we upgraded this server to Windows 2008R2 a few weeks and we haven't had the issue since then. If we do I'll certainly report it.