Recently a backup job was created to backup and VM from an ESXi host to a backup repository on a QNAP. Everything appeared to be configured correctly and all usernames and passwords were correct but it would still fail every time it was tested.
This is the error message I would see each time.
The network path was not found. Agent failed to process method {Stg.OpenReadWrite}.
After testing and removing and adding almost every part of the configuration again I finally figured out what the issue was. The credentials for the QNAP shared were correct but for some reason when I removed them from the credential manager and added them again the backup worked.
I have no idea why this worked because when I would choose the backup repository to use it could see used and free space details along with existing backups. The backup is now running without issue so it’s worth a try if you are having a similar issue.
We were in the process of migrating VMs from one datacentre to another using Veeam Backup & Replication when our main host crashed with a CPU error. The production VMs had been running on the server for a few hours and hadn’t yet been fully replicated to the replication partner. One of the VMs is Server 2003 so was running in Instant Recovery mode as is couldn’t be migrated using replication like the other VMs.
Thankfully the server rebooted and all the VMs started without issue except the Server 2003 VM. When viewing the console it only displayed a black screen which was worrying as there was no backup of the last 6 hours of changes.
After submitting a case on the Veeam site a member of the support team called within 20 minutes and quickly got the VM up and running again. The issue in our case was that the Veeam B&R software is installed on a VM running on the host that crashed. When the VM restarted the Veeam services didn’t start in the required order. The Veeam vPower NFS service needs to start after the Veeam Backup service.
To fix the issue the only steps required were to restart the Veeam vPower NFS service on the system running Veeam B&R then start the VM.
Quite often a hard drive supplied in a laptop or as part of a pre-built system will contain a number of recovery or system partitions which cannot be deleted using the Windows disk management tool. The partitions may be labeled as Healthy (Recovery Partition) or Healthy (OEM Partition) and can vary in size from a few hundred megabytes up to tens of gigabytes. If the disk is being reused for another purpose the recovery partitions will not be needed so the best option is to remove them.
Unwanted Partitions shown in Disk Management
Normally I would boot Parted Magic from a USB pendrive and use the partition editor to clear the drive. However there are times when removing the partitions without rebooting is preferred, thankfully there is a way to do this from the command line. Simply follow the steps below to delete the offending partitions.
Using Diskpart to delete partitions
*** Ensure the partitions are not needed before continuing. Normally this would not be done on the main Windows disk as it could easily result in a damaged Windows install ***
Open a command prompt as an administrator
Type diskpart and hit enter
Type rescan and hit enter, the drives will be scanned for partitions
Type list disk and hit enter to display a list of disks in the system
Select the required disk from the list by typing select disk x (where x is the number of the disk) then hit enter
Type list partition and hit enter to display a list of partitions of the selected disk
Type select partition x (where x is the partition number) and hit enter to select the partition to be deleted
Type delete partition override and hit enter to delete the partition. There will be no confirmation before the partition is deleted so ensure the correct partition has been selected.
To delete more than one partition simply repeat steps 7 and 8 until all the unwanted partitions have been deleted.
