Troubleshoot: Veeam Backup & Replication v6, Failed to index guest file system error
Last week I was trouble shooting a problem that has appeared after I upgraded the Veeam Backup & Replication version 5 to version 6. Before the upgrade the backups where working correctly. No errors and everything was working accordantly. Then I upgraded the application, this went without any problems. The version that is running is 6.0.0.153.
The backup is configured to index the files of the backup so if there is a need to restore a file the customer can search through the backup and select the file that’s need to be restored.
After the upgrade I ran an test backup, this job failed with an error. The backup went fine, but the indexing of the backup file failed. The error was:
Failed to index guest file system. Details: Error: Cannot read data from volume Win32 error:The handle is invalid. Code: 6
In my case both servers where converted from a physical server to a virtual server on an VMware vSphere 4.1 platform. Both servers where running Windows 2003 Server.
I started looking for a solution on internet, Google is your best friend. I found a Veeam Forum article called Guest file indexing. See http://forums.veeam.com/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=9721
This article describes exactly my problem. Also a converted Windows 2003 server. With Veeam version 5 no problems, with Veeam version 6 indexing error.
After reading the whole article my solution for the fix is patch 2 for Veeam 6. How to get this Patch 2, because it is not available for public download. So I created a support case. I uploaded the log files, and after a few hours I received an e-mail with the link to the patch that I need to install. After installing the patch my index error message went away, so the patch worked. Great work Veeam Support for the fast response.
Things that get fixed with patch 2 (http://forums.veeam.com/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=9533#p41806) are:
- Issue 1. Direct SAN Access processing mode does not work for certain SAN makes and models.
- Issue 2. Virtual Appliance (Hot Add) processing mode does not work when backup proxy is installed on localized version of Microsoft Windows.
- Issue 3. Upgrade related issues affecting jobs created in v5 – poor incremenal backup performance, and large VIB file created on the first incremental run.
- Issue 6. Guest file system indexing fail on certain VMs with the “Win32 error:The handle is invalid” error.
- Issue 8. For v6 backup servers that were upgraded from v5, jobs fail to send email notifications if SMTP server requires authentication.
- Issue 9. Reversed incremental backup mode jobs scheduled to run on specific days only will also start on synthetic full backup day (as set under incremental backup mode options in the advanced job settings). Due to the same bug, Replication and VM Copy jobs will always start on Saturday (which is the default day for synthetic full backup).
- Issue 10. For jobs writing to CIFS-based backup repositories, backup results are not set in the selected VM attribute upon job completion.
- Issue 11. Added support for Cisco Nexus 1000V switch (port groups were not visible in UI).
- Issue 13. Added VM heartbit check for Migration jobs. Original VM files will not be removed until the heartbit is received. This was needed because it was reported that under certain circumstances (we were not able to reproduce this to date), the migration job fails to copy the virtual disk contents correctly, but nevertheless deletes the original.
- Issue 15. Under certain circumstances, the job fails with the following error: “Client error: Cannot allocate memory for an array. Array size: [4198400].”
- Issue 16. For VMs configured to use VMware DVS (Distributed Virtual Switch), restore and replication into a different vCenter server will fail.
