Troubleshooting VMware backups and restores of SharePoint Server
Note the following when you perform a VMware backup that protects an application:
One Application State Capture job is created per VM, regardless of which applications are selected in policy.
The ASC job can fail if the VMware disk layout has changed since the last discovery. In this situation, you must force NetBackup to rediscover virtual machines by lowering the value of the option. See the NetBackup for VMware Administrator's Guide.
If the ASC job fails, the VMware snapshot or backup continues. Application-specific data cannot be restored.
When you query the SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS), it may show that the database was backed up. In this case, though the database was skipped, the snapshot was still successful.
The ASC job can result in status 1 (partially success). For example, if SharePoint was protected, but SQL failed to be protected.
Failure results in the discovery job or parent job exiting with status 1.
ASC messages are filtered to the ASC job details.
If you enable recovery for a particular application but that application does not exist on the VM, the ASC job returns Status 0.
Details on the ASC job can be found in the Activity monitor job details.
bpfis is executed and simulates a VSS snapshot backup. This simulation is required to gain logical information of the application.
GRT live browse error of a SharePoint application-aware VMware image
When you perform a live browse of VMware SharePoint application-aware backups where the Primary VM identifier is not a NetBIOS name (for example, display name or UUID), a client name like
client SP2010becomesclient%20SP2010. The result is that the SharePoint live browse fails with database system error becauseclient%20SP2010is not recognized as a valid client name.Use one of the following workarounds for this issue:
In the NetBackup Administration Console, add an entry to . The is the name of the application host. The front-end client name is the name of the component host.
If the cannot be added to the Distributed Application Restore Mappings using the GUI on the master server then manually add the entry. For UNIX master servers, add the
SPS_REDIRECT_ALLOWEDentry to thebp.conf file. For Windows master servers, add anSPS_REDIRECT_ALLOWEDregistry entry.The Application State Capture job fails for SharePoint when there is a Content database with no site collections present. To avoid this issue, remove the empty Content database or create a site collection in the Content database.
When you use a VMWare policy to protect SharePoint, the Application State Capture job returns an error for any SQL Servers that host multiple SharePoint farms. SharePoint configurations that have any SQL Server back-end servers that service multiple SQL Server instances for multiple SharePoint farms are not supported with SharePoint application-enabled VMware policies.
If a media server is not added in the Additional Servers list, ContentDB restore from a VMware job fails with error 2804. To add a media server to the list, do the following:
In the NetBackup Administration Console, go to .
Double-click the name of the master server to view the properties.
Select Servers in the left pane to display the list of servers.
Select the Additional Servers tab and click Add to add the media server to the list of servers.