Error: Backup Console version '9.0.0.1715' is not compatible with Installer service on host...

[ejenner]

Hi guys,

I've found a bit of an awkward situation with some automated behavior in Veeam which is stopping backups from running.

During our migration from an older version of VMware to our current Hyper-V virtual environment we were intending to leave our original backup of VMware with Veeam 9 running as it was until the VMware was fully decommissioned.

I decided I wanted to make a tape copy of that old VMware backup so I targeted the jobs with my newer 9.5 Veeam tape server. This turned out not to be possible as the 9.5 server won't play nicely with an earlier version of Veeam.

So... I decided to upgrade the early version of Veeam. Before I upgraded it I wanted to back it up. So I installed the 9.5 agent and configured a job on my main 9.5 B&R console.

As soon as I'd configured the backup of the v9 server with my v9.5 environment the v9 backups stopped working with the error mentioned in the subject. (Error: Backup Console version '9.0.0.1715' is not compatible with Installer service on host...)

Now, here's where it gets really exciting. If you uninstall the Veeam 9.5 agent from the v9 server (which was the process which installed the 9.5 installer service on the v9 server originally) it does not remove the 9.5 installer service from the old server.

To remove the 9.5 installer service you have to delete the files from C:\Windows\Veeam to get rid of the installer files. Then go to the registry and manually remove the service from the registry. Then restart the computer. Then you have to repair the v9 installation. I did that by running the veeam_backup_9.0.0.1715.update2_setup file or by running a repair from Programs and Features. Not sure which is best (maybe one of those methods doesn't work?)

Now, here's where it gets EVEN MORE exciting. At 9pm every night the Veeam installer version 9.5 reappears on the v9 server and breaks the backups again. This has happened several nights in a row. The only thing I think must be doing this is the job that's configured on the 9.5 B&R server. The job is scheduled to run at 10pm but it is disabled. So do disabled jobs still push out an agent? Seems to be the case! Or is it an automated rescan of the server that's doing it?

Now, trying to upgrade from v9 to v9.5 when the Veeam database is on SQL 2005 further adds complication as the Veeam installer won't do the DB upgrade for you. You have to do that manually. This is also failing as the tools Microsoft provide for doing this assume you have an ultra clean system with nothing getting in the way of your upgrade.

I also tried exporting the configuration using the configuration backup feature... but because the versions are too far apart you can't import the old .bco files into the Veeam current version.

Anyway, long story short.... many of the things Veeam is doing automatically to help in this case is actually massively unhelpful. I can see a path through this, which is to upgrade to the current version but at the same time avoid all the obstacles. It's just very slow and complicated and sometimes this can't be accomplished within a day so it is ready to perform the next backup.

[ejenner]

The error message you get after manually removing the installer service is

Error: The RPC server is unavailable RPC function call failed. Function name: [GetSvcVersion]. Target machine: [192.168.xxx.xxx]

You then have to repair-install by re-running the original setup file.

[foggy]

The general recommendation is not to share servers running any of Veeam B&R components between different backup servers unless they have an identical patch level.

[Gostev]

Actually, it's not just recommendation: we do not support sharing B&R components between different backup servers at all.

The main reason is that these servers are not aware of each other, so their respective intelligent load balancers have no awareness of the amount of tasks created on the given component by another backup server. And this directly transforms into backup performance and reliability through overloaded components.

More importantly, being unsupported this scenario is not tested, so there could be other major issues too. Especially when components versions differ... corruptions are not impossible, for example if some check is missing that is supposed to block different component versions from communicating with each other.

[ejenner]

I'm not really asking for support as I know what I'm doing wouldn't be recommended. This setup has been running v9 for years and has co-existed with 9.5 for 12+ months without any trouble. The main issue came when I installed Windows Agent from 9.5 to try and back it up before upgrading it. Since then I've had lots of trouble. Nevertheless, I'm very pleased that I did back it up before attempting the upgrade as I had to restore.

See our email report from last night. The jobs are successful up to the point where the Veeam Agent is pushed out to the machine at around 9pm.

I think this is the last time this will be a problem as I'm going to try and upgrade to the current version today. It's just quite a challenge as the DB must be upgraded from 2005 to 2014 (at least) and the wizard from MS which is meant to do this cannot complete the process.

[foggy]

Veeam B&R and Veeam Backup for Windows do share some components so once you installed the latter it immediately caused version conflicts.