Veeam VSSSupport service

[ashman70]

What is the Veeam VSSSupport windows service? I am having an issues with a Windows SBS 2011 virtual machine running on Esxi 5.5 which has not had backups for two days now, replication jobs are failing also. I have noticed this service which is not on another of my clients SBS 2011 servers which is being backed up by Veeam 6.5. This service is set to auto but often seems stopped. Is it only supposed to start during a backup or replication job and then stop when the job completes or fails? Or should it be running all the time? I have edited the registry entry to lengthen the timeout for SBS servers but it has not helped.

The job always fails with the same error:

Failed to prepare guest for hot backup. Error: VSSControl: Failed to prepare guest for freeze, wait timeout 1800 sec
Error: VSSControl: Failed to prepare guest for freeze, wait timeout 1800 sec

[veremin]

The job always fails with the same error:

Have you already checked the corresponding KB article?

it only supposed to start during a backup or replication job and then stop when the job completes or fails? Or should it be running all the time?

It's a run time process that should be triggered during a backup or replication job.

I am having an issues with a Windows SBS 2011 virtual machine running on Esxi 5.5 which has not had backups for two days now, replication jobs are failing also. I have noticed this service which is not on another of my clients SBS 2011 servers which is being backed up by Veeam 6.5.

I hope your client isn't running vSphere 5.5, as Veeam 6.5 doesn't support that.

Thanks.

[ashman70]

Yes I have checked the KB article, increasing the timeout does not help unfortunately. Ok thats good to know about the service, thank you. No in that instance the SBS 2011 VM is running on Exsi 5 but the vSSSuport service is not present on that VM and the backups run fine every night without fail.

[veremin]

You can try to delete the said service and see whether it helps or not. It should be re-deployed during the next job cycle. If that doesn't work, open a ticket with our support team and let them investigate it directly. Thanks.

[Vitaliy S.]

Usually these kind of issues with freeze operations are caused by high load on the SBS VM, check its CPU/Memory and Disk IO performance.

[ashman70]

Yes I am aware of the high load issues associated with this problem, however this VM does not have high load CPU or memory and although it may be disk I/O related, I cannot see that it is thus far.

[ashman70]

Working through the case with support, they have advised that I need to contact VMware and or hardware vendor. Here is what I don't understand. Prior to upgrading to V8, backups ran fine under 6.5, after upgrading to V8 backups ran fine for a time, for some reason within the last week, they have stopped working altogether. Nothing has changed on the hardware level, Esxi is still the same version, a windows service pack was applied to SBS 2011 that is all. Why would VMware support help me fix Veeam? Something has changed that is affecting Veeam, actually preventing the backups from running. I have increased the time out from 1800000 to 2500000 but this has not helped. Case #00810786

[Vitaliy S.]

If you install v6.5 back on a separate server, do backup jobs finish successfully?

[ashman70]

Support gave me some commands to run to delete shadow copies and that seems to have done the trick, backup and replication jobs are now completing, thanks.

[veremin]

Most likely, stuck VSSService didn't allow jobs to proceed any further. Once it was deleted and re-deployed during subsequent job run, everything started to work correctly. Thanks for the confirmation; appreciated.