As the title says, VSS snapshot of my VxVM volumes is failing.
System Description:
W2k8 R2 SP1, FC-attached diks, SFWHA 6.0.1 installed
Backup software being used: EMC NetWorker
Problem:
At this point, backup of the disks under VxVM (if that's not a totally obsolete terminology to use - I see Windows classes SFHA volumes as such in the registry, anyway) is failing. The strange thing is that it was working up until a certain point on Friday, at which point I did some un/re-configuring of the NetWorker client software on the machine, and then it stopped. Originally I also had VCS installed, and two nodes were acting as part of a cluster, but I removed VCS to try and narrow down the problem. Right now only Storage Foundations for Windows (HA) is installed on both machines.
The disks are provisioned via FC, and are configured, one disk each, in disk groups "DG1" and "DG2". One group, "DG2", is imported and the single volume on it is mounted as "Y:\".
When I attempt a backup of files on this volume, it just hangs for a long time (~30 minutes), until VSS finally times out, and then finally prodceeds to do a backup without a snapshot (legacy method, as we call it).
This is what I get in the system logs through event viewer:
The same happens whether the Veritas VSS provider is registered or not, or whether its service is running or not.
In my efforts to troubleshoot this, the only thing I've noticed that may be a bit odd is that I have quite a few entries in the registry for volumes, more than I have actual physical volumes. The system has one "local" drive, and two under VxVM control. These are testing systems, and so have had SFW 5.2 installed previously, plus I have now installed and uninstalled SFW 6.0.1 several times while trying to trouble shoot this. Note that the GUID of one of them does match the error message above.
Backup of the local (C:\) disk works normally.
For all I know this may not be a SFW/VCS problem at all, but an issue with Microsoft's flaky (in my experience, anyway) VSS implementation.
TIA,
Ryan