Hi All,
Just a tip if someone experiencing the same problem that we did.
A few months ago we started having random error when running scheduled backup of vCenter. This had worked up until that point flawlessly, and we could not figure out from the logs what could be wrong. When testing manual backup we managed 1 out of 10 times to create a successful backup, but most of the time it failed.
When we thought we had checked everything we stumbled over some relevant information in the firewall logs. The reason the backup failed was that the firewall blocked traffic it saw as "Bruteforce Attempt". The reason for this is that when vCenter starts its backup process it runs thru a series of startup task like creating folders on the backup server etc. During this startup vCenter opens up loads of ssh connections (one for each task it looks like) and our firewall is set up to drop ssh if total number of connections from the same host exceeds a given amount .
What we saw was that vCenter could reach up to 25 concurrent sessions during the startup of a new backup routine.
Maybe this is a known issue, but I could not find any info that pointed me in the right direction when i was troubleshooting, so I thought I would post my findings here if someone have the same experiences.
If you do, its worth looking at the firewall a bit more thoroughly than I did.
Happy vCenter = happy life 🙂
