Best practices when backing up Veeam server on a VM?

[SecondCity]

Hey all,

I just attempted to run a backup of my Veeam server (itself a VM, running Win2k8R2). Unfortunately, the server seemed to have crashed - it killed my RDP connection, and attempting to open a console via vSphere was unsuccessful. Everything appeared to be going fine with the backup...in fact, the byte count was at 100% and I assume Veeam was attempting to clean the snapshot from vSphere.

I ended up having to force-shutdown the server from vSphere, then bring it back up normally. There was nothing in the Windows error logs that pointed toward any kind of issue. Everything looked fine with all the usual VSS start/stops...then nothing until the normal startup procedure log events. Opening the Veeam console shows the last backup listed as "Error", with label: "Job has failed unexpectedly". Nothing appears out of the ordinary (to my very untrained eye) in the log file for the job. Other server backups run just a-ok fine after that crash-restart.

I seem to recall seeing another post about this in the forum last week, but can't for the life of me put together a good enough search string to find it. Am I doing something wrong? I'm running virtual appliance mode on the Veeam server itself with VSS integration checked. Should I be running in Network mode without VSS...? No other roles are assigned to this VM - it's Veeam only.

Thanks!
John

[Gostev]

Hi John,

1. Do not use Virtual Appliance mode when backing up itself (as per Release Notes).
2. Disable Veeam VSS.

Thanks!

[SecondCity]

That must've been where I saw it (the release notes, not the forums). Thanks once again, Anton!

[maxfontana]

[merged]

Hello.
I've just finished with an upgrade from v5 to v6 and playing around a little bit.
My V6 is installed on a virtual Windows7 sp1 64 bit machine and I tried, just like I usually did with v5, to backup it on a dedicated NAS but this is the error msg I get:
**********
Unable to release guest. Error: VSSControl: Failed to freeze guest, wait timeout
Error: VSSControl: Failed to freeze guest, wait timeout
*****
This didn't happen with another win2008 R2 vm and Vss enabled.
Could it be that, just like the first version of veeam5 when it was released, veeam is unable to backup itself?
Thanks in advance,
max
italy

[Vitaliy S.]

This behavior has nothing to do with v5 or v6, because frozen Veeam B&R server cannot process API calls which are needed to perform backup job. You need to disable "application-aware image processing" to backup your Veeam backup server.

[hannisch]

Hello everybody,

I have the same issue like Max. I upgraded from v5 to v6.
On v5 I had a replication job were application-aware image processing was enabled to replicate the b&R server itself.
This job never failed before. Since the upgrade to v6 this job fails. After reading this forum article I disabled
application-aware image processing. Now it works. But what is about the replicate. Do I get a 100% working server
replicate with a consistant SQL database, when application-aware image processing is not enabled? If not, what is the solution ?
Vitaly wrote the this behavior is not version indepandant, but in my environment it worked with application-aware image processing enabled in V5

b/r

Sven

[Vitaliy S.]

Hello Sven,

Our database is not highly transactional, so disabling application-aware image processing shouldn't cause any issues. If you search these forums you would see that many customers have been using this approach pretty successfully. Besides, it was never possible to backup Veeam server with application aware image processing enabled (as per our Release Notes).

Do you possibly use a remote SQL Server to host our database?

Thank you.

[hannisch]

So, I will disable application-aware image processing.

Thanks.

[A3_h]

I have almost the same problem . But then with the SQL server hosting the SQL database used by Veeam.