VCenter Service Dying

[pjcace]

We have Veeam 7.0 (latest) running to backup our environment of Virtual Center 5.5 and ESX(i) 4.0 and 4.1. Each night when the backups are running, the virtual center service will crash. We have it set to restart automatically and it does, but it stops the backups and causes them to fail. They also leave snapshots out for each of the vms that fail. Support wanted me to run the backups without virtual center, which I'm confident that they will complete successfully. The VCenter server has 8GB ram and doesn't seem to be running out of memory. Anyone have this issue and / or have a solution?

Thanks,

Paul

Veeam Case # 00579563

[Vitaliy S.]

Hi Paul,

I would check vCenter Server Windows Event log for more information on this behavior. What error messages do you see there?

Thanks!

[foggy]

Probably a blind guess, but do you have Veeam B&R R2 update (required for vSphere 5.5 support) installed?

[regnak2012]

Experienced Windows vCenter 5.5 server service crashing regularly, not during backups typically though. Found excluding the EXE/vCenter install folder from AV solved the issue. Worth exploring?

Mike

[pjcace]

So, after checking on the few suggestions, and further digging, I found the issue. It appears that the SQL Express database for vcenter was filling up to the max license limit each night. I guess it would clear out and we would be back in action again, only to have it fill up again.

We moved it to our production SQL cluster and have not had the same problem since.

Thanks,

[rogereales]

I run loads of VMware and Veeam solutions for my clients. For me having the SQL database on another box other than vCentre server only complicates issues in DR situations (been there done that). That means you have to bring up multiple VM's to get vCentre running which can be a pain and sometimes not possible.

If you set the logging in vCentre to only keep 30 days this should rarely happen.

You can also run this SQL script and then shrink your database afterwards (once a year).

http://www.thevirtualway.it/en/?p=747

I hope this helps