Random Windows Server Backup Failures

The following is a modified re post of  TechNet article. The original http://blogs.technet.com/b/asiasupp/archive/2011/08/01/windows-server-backup-failed-to-backup-with-error-0x81000101.aspx contained an error of one to many zeros in the Dword Value.

 

I found the article while I was trying to troubleshoot what seemed to be completely random Backup failures on an HP ML350 G5 SBS 2008 Server. The backups would fail and when I ran VSSAdmin List Writers, numerous writers were in a state of "Waiting on Completion". The only way I could get a good backup was to reboot the server, a few days later it would fail again. Further troubleshooting led me to discover through HP Insight Diagnostics that one of the drives in a Mirror was failed. "The Read Write HARD error rate is above threshold". I contacted HP for a drive replacement and made the registry edit. I advised the customer that they would need to reboot that night so that they would get a good backup. They forgot to, but the Backup was successful. I believe this was due to changing the Timeout  value. I believe this was the first time that I have seen a successful backup when all the VSS Writers were not in a stable error free state. Checking them the next day, they were all Stable and no errors.

 

Symptom:

Sometimes Windows Server Backup failed to backup the data. The error is:

The shared restore point operation failed with error (0x81000101) The creation of a shadow copy has timed out. Try this operation again.

In the event viewer, found the following error:

The backup operation that started at '‎**** has failed because the Volume Shadow Copy Service operation to create a shadow copy of the volumes being backed up failed with following error code '2155348001'. Please review the event details for a solution, and then rerun the backup operation once the issue is resolved.

Cause:

Windows Server Backup is timing out during shadow copy creation since it is taking more than 10 minutes.

Resolution:

- Run regedit.exe and navigate to "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\SPP"

- Create a new Registry value of type DWORD with name "CreateTimeout"

- Change value to 1200000(2*10*60*1000 = 20 mins) in decimal

Server 2012 Hyper-V Failover

 I won't get into to much detail on the various types of  failover possible with Server 2012 Hyper-V. I just wanted to show how simple the failover of replicated machines is.

The first image shows the failover options on the machine with the running virtual machine, notice the "Planned Failover".

 On the replica server we have "Failover" and "Test Failover". Test Failover creates a copy of the replicated VM and mounts it to test the viability of the VM. "Failover should only be used when the source VM becomes unavailable.

 Running a "Planned Failover" first runs through a Prerequisite check to make sure all is well. A check mark chooses whether to start the replica after the failover.

 It is always nice to see green check marks assuring that things are going well.

The Source VM has been successfully failed over and the replica has been started. Now you can change the network settings to configure access to the failed over VM.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Notice how the options have changed on the replica Server. They now are what they were on the source Server. This allows you to perform a planned failover back to the original source Server.

Server 2012 Hyper-V Replication

     One of the most exciting new features of Server 2012 is Hyper-V Replication. This post will include a basic tutorial on getting that feature working. In my test setup I have a Server 2012 that was upgraded from Server 2008R2. This Server hosts a VM of my SBS2011 production server. The upgrade from Server 2008R2 vent very smoothly and it was nice to not have to start from scratch.
    The second Server 2012 was built from scratch and the only role added was Hyper-V. The method that I chose for authentication was Kerberos since both Hyper-V Hosts were member servers. After following the steps to enable replication for a particular VM everything I tried resulted in Authentication failure. Looking at the Hyper-V logs on both machines I found numerous event ID 14050 errors.
Failed to register the service principal name 'Microsoft Virtual System Migration Service'.
Failed to register the service principal name 'Microsoft Virtual Console Service'.
Failed to register the service principal name 'Hyper-V Replica Service'.
After searching for possible causes and solutions many of them listed in the following wiki http://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/1340.hyper-v-troubleshooting-event-id-14050-vmms.aspx
I also made sure that I had at least one network adapter not being used by Hyper-V and made sure that I had Static IPs for all adapters with the proper DNS entered in their configuration. Still no success, I decided to add DNS and Directory Services roles to the primary Hyper-V Server. I did this for a couple of reasons, one being the fact that it always boots before my primary domain controller secondly I wanted another DNS server to allow Internet browsing when I have the SBS2011 VM down for any reason.
    Viola, Not sure why but my 14050 errors were gone on both 2012 servers, replaced by 14052 events stating successful registration of SPNs as well as 29290 events about updating of Firewall Rules. So onto replication!! The following screenshots show the basic process.

 

Right click on the machine that you want to replicate and select Enable Replication.

 

Click on specify Replica Server, browse and chose Server.

 

 

 Specify Replica Server Port and Authentication Method.

Chose VHDs to replicate, I unselected  a couple due to disk size and the fact that they weren't crucial to this test. Note... you can only make the choice when enabling replication. You can't add them later without starting the process over.

Chose recovery Points.

 Chose how to transfer initial image. I  chose send initial copy over the Network, all 500 gig of it. When to start the replication is also set here.

 Summary and click finish, hopefully no errors.

 At long last No Errors!!

 The VM shows up in the replication Server.

 Replication Status, Initial replication took only about 2.5 hours for 500 Gig. I was impressed.
I will be posting more on other features such as Failover.