Veeam SQL Transaction Log backup job fails

[Jethron]

Veeam Support - Case # 03955261, they've been great...but we are stumped at the moment. I have 4 Veeam SQL Transaction log backup jobs, they've run fine for years. All of a sudden one quit working on a Sunday night (the other 3 are running fine). Veeam still backs up the server just fine, but the separate Veeam trans log backup job fails. The error is as follows "Failed to prepare guest for SQL Server transaction log backup Details: No connection could be made because the target machine actively refused it x.x.x.x:2523 (x.x.x.x is the IP of the Veeam server)".

VMWare Tools is up-to-date, I've restarted the SQL server, no Windows\SQL\VMWare patches applied in the last 3 weeks. There are only 2 admins, neither of us have made any changes to the firewall, vcenter, anti-virus, SQL. I can log onto the SQL box and use SQL to perform a transaction log backup (the Veeam tech asked me to do that as a test)…..so I don't think this is a SQL issue. All my other Veeam jobs are running great. The SQL server does not do trans log backups, we rely on Veeam to do it. The job does a trans log backup every hour. I see nothing in the Event logs of the Veeam server or SQL box that gives any indication there is an issue. Veeam support has a load of logs they are investigating.

[soncscy]

Hey Jed,

No idea what is throwing this, but since I've been around the block (quite a few times) with Veeam and such, I've gotten used to separating Veeam errors from Windows Errors from VMWare errors.

'No connection could be made...' is 100% from Windows/.NET. I know you've written you have changed nothing, but the wonderful news about Modern Windows environments is that you don't need to change anything MS/whatever application vendor will gladly change it for you.

From my perspective, this seems like something is stopping Veeam from deploying the SQL backup agent on the SQL server, or that it is deploying and you just cannot connect to the process listening on the port.

For my money's worth, I'd check if the Veeam stuff actually gets deployed on your server first; remember, nothing's gonna connect to a socket if nothing's listening on that port to begin with. If Veeam thinks it has an agent there but it really doesn't, you might be getting such a response, and this is just the error that percolated to the forefront.

Else, if you can see the Veeam SQL backup stuff is running, this probably means you do have a rogue device/app blocking communication. In my clients environments, this is when I'd scrounge up an intern to practice Wireshark and check what we see in the dumps.

[Jethron]

Well, shame on me for not doing this sooner. I decided to restart the Veeam environment, so far the Transaction log backup job has worked 3 straight days.....I've asked Veeam to leave the ticket open for a week and they agreed. I hadn't bothered to restart the Veeam environment because this was the only machine that had issues (75+ servers had no issues).