Tag: esxi

Veeam Backups Failing – Network path not found

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.

Veeam Instant Recovery VM won’t boot after host failure

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.

ESXi 5.5 error occurred consolidating disks

The setup is two ESXi 5.5 hosts, one is the main host with three live servers and the second is the backup host with three server replicas, Acronic Applicance and vCenter Server. There is a separate physical machine used as the backup target for the scheduled backup tasks. In addition to backing up to the physical target the three virtual servers are replicated to the secondary host each night.

Nightly backups of the three virtual machines using the Acronis appliance were failing and the Acronis appliance was powering off. According to the Acronis log it was running out of space while running the backups. Normally it is just a matter of deleting all the snapshots using vSphere Client but this time one of them just would not delete.

After reloading the vSphere client one of the replica VMs had a warning saying that it’s disks needed to be consolidated. Several attempts resulted in a error saying the disk images were locked. The Acronis appliance was turned off but it turns out that it was locking files relating to the replica VM. I had to boot and then shutdown the Acronis appliance three times before it would release the lock on the files and the consolidation worked perfectly followed by the removal of the snapshot.