vCenter backup is failing - ERROR: BackupManager encountered an exception: Failed to receive data/response from the remote server

Products

• VMware vCenter Server

Issue/Introduction

The vCenter has recently been upgraded from 7.x to 8.x.

Since the upgrade the backup is failing (both manual and automatic).

No other changes have been made on the backup server or the network, and the credentials used to authenticate to the backup server have been confirmed to be correct

The backup runs for approximately 1 minute and then fails with this error -

ERROR: BackupManager encountered an exception: Failed to receive data/response  from the remote server

 

The log /var/log/vmware/applmgmt/backup.log contains these entries at the time of the backup failure - 

• ERROR: rc: 2, stderr: /usr/bin/tar: -: Cannot write: Broken pipe
/usr/bin/tar: Error is not recoverable: exiting now
• INFO: Skip to report the error.
• ERROR: Process returncode is 2, but expected exit codes are [0].
• stderr: b'curl: (56) Recv failure: Connection reset by peer\n'

Environment

vCenter 8.x

Cause

Permissions issue on existing backup folder, created under vCenter running 7.x - when trying to backup to the folder from vCenter running 8.x

Resolution

• Note the destination path specified when configuring the backup in the VAMI - 

ftp://backup_server_fqdn/VAMIBackup

• This writes the backups into a path - 

//backup_server_fqdn/VAMIBackup/vCenter/vcenter_fqdn/

• The existing vcenter_fqdn folder should be deleted
• The backup should be run again to -

ftp://backup_server_fqdn/VAMIBackup

• This time, the backup is expected to succeed