Veeam BAckup crashing my ESX server

[rowbi]

Hi

I have just started using Veeam backup v4.0 as a virtual machine on 2 seperate ESX3.5 servers, each with approx 8 VM's to backup.

I have come accross problems running in VMWare storage API, virtual appliance mode with the following error:
Backing up file "[bp_datastore1] BPEIHDC1/BPEIHDC1-flat.vmdk" BackupDisk failed Client error: The specified transports are not available. Available transports: [nbd]. Specified transports: [hotadd]. VMDK path: [[bp_datastore1] BPEIHDC1/BPEIHDC1.vmdk]. Server error: The specified transports are not available. Available transports: [nbd]. Specified transports: [hotadd]. VMDK path: [[bp_datastore1] BPEIHDC1/BPEIHDC1.vmdk]. Failed to process VM disk backup. VMDK path: [vddk://<vddkConnSpec><viConn name="192.168.245.200" authdPort="902" vicPort="443" /><vmxPath vmRef="16" datacenterRef="ha-datacenter" datacenterInventoryPath="ha-datacenter" snapshotRef="/vmfs/volumes/4893a745-78787883-8ca0-001f29e3702a/BPEIHDC1/BPEIHDC1.vmx-snapshot-17" datastoreName="bp_datastore1" path="BPEIHDC1/BPEIHDC1.vmx" /><vmdkPath datastoreName="bp_datastore1" path="BPEIHDC1/BPEIHDC1.vmdk" /><transports seq="hotadd" /><readBuffer size="2097152" /></vddkConnSpec>].

so I decided to use just network backup, which sucessfully backed up all my machines over the weekend (a total of 1.5TB of data).

Then came Monday night and doing the rollup backup (or whatever it does when it doesn't do a real full) and my ESX server crashed, and couldn't be seen by VI Center or on SSH. the VM's actually stayed up, but I couldn't shut them down even on the iLO accessed command line. the same thing happened to the other ESX server last night, and has never happened before in over a year of having both mahcines, so I'm thinking this may be caused by Veeam. Also what makes me think that is Veeam is that a backup was sucessful on the crashed ESX server, and then all other backups fail, so that would suggest that it's doing something that's overloading the ESX server. Here's the error message I get from other backup jobs after the ESX server half crashes:
Checking backup version Failed to login to "192.168.244.1" by SSH, port 22, user "root", elevateToRoot False, autoSudo False A connection attempt failed because the connected party did not properly respond after a period of time, or established connection failed because connected host has failed to respond 192.168.244.1:22

Any help would be great, or any idea of what logs to check to work out what's going on would be good too.

Regards

Rowbi

[Vitaliy S.]

Hello Rowbi,

Actually, the error you saw states that Veeam wasn't able to connect to your ESX hosts to do a backup job, as the host was already down at the time when Veeam Backup wanted to connect to it to start the job. If you could send us (support@veeam.com) all the logs from Help->Support Information as well the most recent logs from your ESX hosts:

/var/log/dmesg
/var/log/vmkernel*
/var/log/vmware/hostd-0.log

Then judging by the time stamps in the logs, and additional information, we will be able to see what exactly happened, if not you'll have enough information to open a support case with VMware.

Thank you.