I'm sure this will be a favourite topic, but I was wondering if anyone could shed any light on this situation.
We have a customer which has Server 2008 R2 with a .vhd which is 1.46TB in size, and a fixed disk. They have only 150GB spare on the drive which seemed like enough. We have had an occasional full HyperV backup to tape, but almost every other day it fails with the following in Backup Exec (now 2014):
"V-79-40960-38521 - Snapshot Technology: Initialization failure on: "VRTSRV::\\HG-2008-STD\Hyper-V?Virtual?Machine\HG-2011-SBS". Snapshot technology used: Microsoft Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS).
A virtual machine snapshot could not be created. Use the Event Viewer on the Hyper-V host to identify the cause. If the virtual machine is not properly configured, it may be necessary to use the Event Viewer in the virtual machine to identify the
cause."
In the Event log of the Virtual Machine itself, there is only one VSS error, of which I'm told I can safely ignore, but resolved anyway:
"Error: NetLocalGroupGetMemebers(spfarm), 0x80070560, The specified local group does not exist."
I also have the following error on the physical host each time I run the backup:
"Failed to create the backup of virtual machine 'HG-2011-SBS'. (Virtual machine ID A5185ADC-F34B-4898-927C-784EBC23EA1B)"
Symantec say it's the VSS writers (apart from one support technician who admitted their product was a joke) but then Microsoft say it's Symantecs issue. I'm inclined to believe Microsoft in this case, but I'm getting nowhere and our customer isn't getting a reliable backup of their whole vhd.
Is this due to only having slightly less than 10% free space on the physical host or just Backup Exec being its usual self? Does HyperV REQUIRE that you have a certain percentage of space free on the physical machine to process?