SureBackup and Citrix Machine Provisioning Services

[rencinas]

Hey All,

Just a heads up, we've been having issues with some of our Citrix machine provisioned servers were showing up as "Unknown PowerState" in Citrix Director. It turns out that after SureBackup unregisters the machine in vCenter, the power state on the production box goes into the unknown state....

I'm unsure what the cause is but I suspect that the machine identifier in vCenter is the same as the one Veeam uses...and the wires get crossed, making our own home brewed denial of service.

Our workaround was to just delete the machines in Veeam and exclude them from being backed up. SureBackup won't be able to find them in the repositories then and should work without causing the issue. We then have to find another method of protecting those machines.

Maybe this could be something that we fix in future releases?

Cheers,

[Egor Yakovlev]

Hi Ryan,
not much to fix here from Veeam side, as all processes are working as designed. I am not a Citrix expert and problem causing Unknown Power State is on Citrix side, however quick search gave me 6 pages long Citrix KB article that explains a lot of possible causes and fixes for such Power State issue. Please check it and see if some of provided solutions might apply to your case. Ideally, you want to post same question on Citrix forums to see if some of their experts has a solution.
From Veeam side you can also run SureBackup on dedicated hosts(Virtual Lab settings), outside Citrix infrastructure to completely isolate Test\Dev from Production.
/Thanks!

[rencinas]

I've put the surebackup job to a specific host but the unknown powerstate is happens to citrix boxes that are in the same vCenter, not the same host. ie. surebackup is set to one host but causes the unknown power state outage in another cluster. I guess we could use a host that isn't in vCenter at all. I'll be sure to follow up with Citrix on the issue too. On another note, I'd think that SureBackup should have a feature to set a new VM UID so that it doesn't cause issues in the future.