VMware vCenter Server moved from physical to virtual

[perjonsson1960]

Folks,

(I don't know if this belongs here or in the "Physical & Cloud" subforum.)

Our VMware gurus have today converted our physical vCenter server to virtual. "Sucked it in" to VMware, if you will. That seems to work fine from Veeam's perspective. The server still has the same name and IP-address as before, and B&R seems to "see" everything exactly as before.

However, when I try to include the old physical machine, which has a new name and IP-address, into the protection group, I get the following error:

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2019-05-09 14:59:33 :: Unable to install backup agent: cannot connect to esxi00.dir1.local Error: Known agent esxi01.dir1.local have the same bios uuid 31323436-3730-5a43-3232-353030573944 but different connection point esxi00.dir1.local.
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"esxi01.dir1.local" is the name of the vCenter server, which is now virtual, and "esxi00.dir1.local" is the new name of the physical machine. How can I install the agent in the physical machine "esxi00" so that I can back it up?

Sincerely,
PJ

[Dima P.]

Hi Per,

I believe you need to 're-add' server to the protection group. Likely due to the difference in BIOS UIID it's now treated as completely different machine, so you have to start new backup.

[perjonsson1960]

I have deleted the old name esxi01.dir1.local from the protection group, and added it again with the new name esxi00.dir1.local, but that didn't help. It still complains about the "bios uuid" being the same in both machines...

[perjonsson1960]

Problem solved! My colleague deleted some registry entries in the physical machine, left our AD, restarted, joined AD again, and restarted. After that it was possible to rescan and install the agent!

[perjonsson1960]

I spoke too soon... The rescan and installation of the agent went well, but the backup failed with the following error:

"Object reference not set to an instance of an object."

When I look at the backup under "Backups / Disk" it seems that it has tried to add the new restore point to the existing backup chain for the old physical "esxi01", instead of creating a new backup chain for "esxi00". It seems that this "bios uuid" is still lurking somewhere, maybe in the Veeam database. So right now we cannot backup the physical machine now named "esxi00". But this is not a big issue since the server is not really used for anything right now, but it would of course be good to get rid of the problem.

[Dima P.]

perjonsson1960,

Indeed it looks like a glitch in the configuration DB, can you please raise a ticket so I could ask our QA folks to review the debug logs? Thank you in advance!

[perjonsson1960]

Case #03557432

[perjonsson1960]

Problem solved! It turned out that it was the change of IP address that caused the problem. Our firewall rule concerning physical servers did not include the new IP address. Our own fault!

Thanks!

PJ