Unable to perform a Granular Recovery Technology (GRT)-enabled backup of the virtual machine using Backup Exec 2010 R2

Products

• VMware vSphere ESXi

Issue/Introduction

Symptoms:

• Cannot back up one or more virtual machine guests using Backup Exec 2010 R2
• You see this error:
  
  Backup Exec failed to snap virtual machine <vm_name> and was unable to collect the necessary metadata to restore individual application items. You cannot perform GRT-enabled restores of application data from this backup.
  
  
• Snapshot operations are successful on the ESX host and vCenter Server

Environment

VMware ESXi 3.5.x Embedded
VMware ESXi 4.1.x Embedded
VMware ESXi 4.1.x Installable
VMware ESX Server 3.5.x
VMware ESX 4.0.x
VMware ESXi 4.0.x Embedded
VMware ESX 4.1.x
VMware Consolidated Backup 1.5.x
VMware ESXi 3.5.x Installable
VMware ESXi 4.0.x Installable

Resolution

This issue may occur if:

• The application and/or VSS services have been stopped within the guest operating system
• The application and/or VSS services have failed or produced errors during the backup attempt

Note: To perform Granular Recovery Technology (GRT)-enabled backups of the system and applications, Backup Exec communicates directly with the guest operating system and the installed Volume Shadow Service (VSS)-aware applications. This issue does not occur if GRT is disabled in the backup job within Backup Exec.

To identify VSS issues, check the the event log of the guest operating system that logs the events each time backup is attempted. For more information on this issue, perform a test NTBackup of the virtual machines.

To troubleshoot VSS issues, see Troubleshooting Volume Shadow Copy (VSS) quiesce related issues (1007696).

For more information, contact your backup application vendor.