SqlWriter Failed Issue

[yuljk]

Hi guys - I'm running Veeam Backup & Replication 9.5 Update 3.

Recently I have a virtual machine which I am receiving warnings for when performing a backup. The Virtual machine is running Windows Server 2012 R2 and Citrix XenDesktop 7.16 with the delivery controller and Citrix Studio roles installed.

VSS: Backup job failed. Cannot notify writers about the 'BACKUP FINISH' event. A VSS critical writer has failed. Writer name: [SqlServerWriter]. Class ID: [{a65faa63-5ea8-4ebc-9dbd-a0c4db26912a}]. Instance ID: [{95c90279-ea8b-4eae-8b01-c2dbb6484700}]. Writer's state: [VSS_WS_FAILED_AT_BACKUP_COMPLETE]. Error code: [0x800423f4].

When checking the state of SqlServerWriter with vssadmin list writers I see

Writer name: 'SqlServerWriter'
Writer Id: {a65faa63-5ea8-4ebc-9dbd-a0c4db26912a}
Writer Instance Id: {95c90279-ea8b-4eae-8b01-c2dbb6484700}
State: [12] Failed
Last error: Non-retryable error

This issue only starting happening after an upgrade of Citrix XenDesktop to 7.16. The database is running on SQL 2012 Express Localdb with Service Pack 4 applied. I noticed after the XenDesktop 7.16 upgrade that SQL 2014 Express Localdb was installed. (Haven't been able to confirm with Citrix as to the purpose of this yet)

A reboot of the VM clears the issue for a while - however it returns.

All Windows updates are applied and the Windows installation just has XenDesktop 7.16 installed. Nothing else.

Disabling Application Aware Processing on the VM clears the issue - but this isn't ideal!

Any help, greatly appreciated

[nielsengelen]

Hi Chris and welcome to the forums. Did you by any chance open up a support case already for insight to see what may be causing this?

[Vitaliy S.]

The issue here refers to VSS writer, so I would recommend to review Windows Event log for more info on why the SQL Server VSS Writer is in failed state. Once SQL VSS writer is fixed, the job should run successfully.

[aich365]

I had a similar problem with SQL2012 and had to install CU2 and a Hotfix KB2983175 to fix the writer.

[dbr]

Even though this is a quite old post we just ran into this issue after upgrading to 7.15 CU3. It seems that the Local Host Cache is recreated after changes to the configuration have been made (nice explanation here). I assume that when updating / recreating the Local Host Cache database the database has a state in which it isn't possible to truncate logs.

Error Message in event log:

Code: Select all

Inconsistent metadata has been encountered. The only possible backup operation is a tail-log backup using the WITH CONTINUE_AFTER_ERROR or NO_TRUNCATE option.

Since a log backup of the LocalDB isn't necessary we changed the SQL processing to Copy only instead of Truncate. We had no error message since one week now. Maybe this information helps someone else.