A few weeks ago i received an email from a customer using VMware Data Protection (VDP) version 5.1.0.56.179 for their vSphere 5.1 (vCenter Server version 5.1.0 880146) environment.
I thought this was a one time issue but a few days ago i received one more email from a another customer with the same issue so i decided to create a blog post about it.
Each day my customer gets an email report from the VDP system and by looking at the VDP appliance status section everything looks ok since:
- Appliance Status: shows Normal
- Failed Backups (Last 72 hours): shows 0
Scrolling down to the “Backup Jobs Summary” section of the VDP email report and looking at the “Last Start Time” and “Next Run Time” you can easily see that something is not as it should be since the VDP email report was received the 4:th of June.
The “Last Successful Backups” and “Last Failed Backups” rows refers to the last completed backup job but has nothing to do with the last backup job completion time.
According to the above you get the impression that no backup jobs has been completed since the 22:th of May and this was verified by logging in to the VDP section of the vSphere Web Client.
The virtual machines included in the backup jobs showed the same thing, latest backup date was 05/22/2013, when trying to perform a restore.
After logging in to the VDP web based administrative UI, https://FQDN:8543/vdp-configure, and looking at the Status tab i found that the VDP “Backup scheduler” service was not running.
One of the VDP “Backup scheduler” service responsibilities is to start the scheduled backups meaning if the service is not started no backup jobs will run and we see exactly what we saw in the VDP backup email report.
After starting the VDP “Backup Scheduler” service the backup jobs runs as expected.
The main take away from this blog post is to make sure you read the entire VDP backup email report before you determine if your backup jobs was started and completed successfully or not.
I’ll update the blog post when the underlying cause of the problem is identified.
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