Troubleshooting Data Protection Issues

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This topic provides guidance for troubleshooting issues that may occur when you are performing System Center Virtual Machine Manager (VMM) checkpoints, or when you are performing backups for data protection. The precise wording of an error message that you observe may differ from this catalog if your VMM installation has been updated with any hotfixes or service packs.

Some error messages contain placeholder text, such as <specified server>. The placeholder text indicates a value that VMM provides in the actual error message.

Data Protection Issues

Issue Possible cause Solution

Virtual Machine Helper (VMH) service will not restart.

If the VMH service is stopped while running, it may not automatically restart because of a dependency on the Virtual Server Service.
  1. Log in with administrator credentials.
  2. Stop the Virtual Server service.
  3. Restart the VMH service.
  4. Restart the Virtual Server service.

Self-service user cannot create a checkpoint.

There are too many checkpoints on the self-service virtual machine. There is a hard limit of 64 checkpoints for a virtual machine. As each new checkpoint is added to a virtual machine, virtual machine performance is impacted.

Have the user merge checkpoints, or merge them for the user using the Administrator Console.

Scripted checkpoint of all virtual machines does not run asynchronously.

The New-VMCheckpoint cmdlet does not support the -RunAsynchronously flag.

To checkpoint multiple virtual machines asynchronously using the VMM Administrator Console, select all virtual machines that are deployed and in one of the following states:

  • Stopped
  • Paused
  • Running
  • Saved State

Then click the New Checkpoint action in the Actions pane.

To checkpoint multiple virtual machines synchronously using the Windows PowerShell - Virtual Machine Manager command shell, run the following cmdlets:

Get-VMMServer %vmmserver-name%
Get-VM | New-VMCheckpoint
> [!NOTE] > This will display some errors if a virtual machine is in a state for which checkpoint operations are not valid, but it will not change the state of that virtual machine. >

VMM database backup fails with error 2208:" The Virtual Machine Manager database <virtual machine manager DB> could not be backed up at <folder name>."

The path given in the VMM Administrator Console should be local to the machine where the Microsoft SQL Server database is installed. By default, the Browse button opens to the local computer the VMM Administrator Console is running on.

Make sure that the specified folder exists, is not a root directory, and is accessible to the SQL Server.

Virtual machine checkpoint fails with error 2214: "Checkpoint actions on virtual machine <computer name> are unsupported because one or more hard disks are shared with other virtual machines."

You added and then soon after tried to checkpoint one of two (or more) virtual machines that share a disk either directly or indirectly. For example, two virtual machines share the same vhd, or two virtual machines have differencing disks that share the same parent.

This error can also happen if the Virtual Server Administration Web site is use to changed the shared disks so that the disks are no longer shared.

From the Windows PowerShell - Virtual Machine Manager shell run the following cmdlet:

Get-VM <virtual Machine name;| Refresh-VM

Then try to checkpoint the virtual machine again.

Alternatively, wait 30 minutes and the VMM Administrator Console will discover and display the changes.

Additional Resources