Veeam + Hyper-V VSS + Application Aware Processing issue
Hello,
ran into what looks like a Veeam bug yesterday, just want to know if anyone else has also experienced similar or this is something very specific to our environment.
It's a fresh greenfield Hyper-V Failover Cluster infra, and Veeam is running in a VM. Version 13, Community Edition.
(Don't want to make a detour here, but: the install ISO is 20 GB. Twenty. Gigabytes. Good god. The first version I worked with was the 5.0, and that was 200 MB. Anyways...)
Now the fun part: after configured everything (Backup Job, Repo, Applicaton Aware Processing), Veeam backups everything just fine - except the backup VM itself. Says can't make production checkpoint (snapshot), error 32770.
The closest thing I find in Veeam's KB is this article:
https://www.veeam.com/kb3137
Did all the the tricks but it just pointed to the VSS integration component error:
VSS Lost Communication. And on the guest VM, the Hyper-V Volume Shadow Copy Requestor service can't start (Error 1053).
Now the fun part: poking around this service, I found this in the service configuration of this service (HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\vmicvss)
ImagePath REG_EXPAND_SZ %systemroot%\system32\svchost.exe -k VeeamHvVssGroupstemNetworkRestrictedRedirectionGuard -p
Which is odd. Checked in other VMs where VSS just works fine:
ImagePath REG_EXPAND_SZ %SystemRoot%\System32\svchost.exe -k VeeamHvVssGroup -p
Hahh. Copy + paste this to the Veeam server. Lo and behold, service can start, VSS production checkpoint works, VM AAP Backup runs fine.
But how that garbage ended in the registry key in the first place? It seem to me that something (Veeam installer?) tried to modify this key from the default, but instead of replacing it with "VeeamHvVssGroup", somehow it just overwritten the first few characters? Don't know actually, just trying to understand what happened here.
Anyone else seen this behavior? Or this is just me?