VCB Mounter Fails to Mount From NFS Over NBD Ambiguously

[JakeWharton]

I am attempting to implement a short-term backup solution for my company using VCB, Backup Exec, and the BE scripts provided for the VMs stored on our central NFS NAS. I am running into an issue attempting to mount the VMs over our computer network with NBD rather than directly from the storage network.

When issuing this command:

vcbmounter -h cimvcs.ourdomain.com -u OURDOMAIN\supervisor -p password -a ipaddr:cimtasks.ourdomain.com -r d:\\vmmount\\cimtasks -t fullvm -m nbd

I always get a failure with this error:

[2011-01-11 11:46:54.122 'vcbMounter' 1672 info] Filenames: vpxa-nfc://[DS01] CIMTASKS/CIMTASKS-000002.vmdk@cimvhost03.ourdomain.com:902!52 6a 1d 73 b6 fd a5 e3-04 f6 f7 fd 38 ba 73 cf  --> d:\\vmmount\\cimtasks\scsi0-0-0-CIMTASKS.vmdk
[2011-01-11 11:46:54.654 'vcbMounter' 1672 error] Error: Failed to open the disk: NBD_ERR_GENERIC

I have searched around the community and internet and have found a few references of this occuring but none with a working solution. This server is a Win2k3 64-bit with VCB framework 1.5.0.5584. We are running vSphere Essentials Plus with vCS and ESXi 4.1.0 258902.

I have attached a run of the vcbmounter command with level 6 logging for further information. Can anyone provide insight as to what is causing this and how to fix it?

edit: Here's an online paste since my upload seems to have been zipped: http://pastebin.com/siQ8cqy0.

The cluster runs EVC Xeon Core 2 but the backup machine has an AMD processor. To rule this out I also tested on a desktop with a regular Core2 and another server with a Xeon, both of which resulted in the same error message.

[denz1217]

Hi Jake,

I just encountered this issue today and was able to find a fix. By the way, I'm running VMware Consolidated Backup 1.5 Update 2 Build 226297 with ESX 4.1.0 Build 348481.

Anyways, the workaround/solution I used was that of under "known issues" in the release notes http://www.vmware.com/support/vsphere4/doc/vsp_vcb_15_u2_rel_notes.html under

Workaround: Set the  disk.EnableUUID parameter in the virtual machine settings  to False by performing the  following steps:

a) Power off the Windows Server 2008 virtual machine through vSphere Client.
b) Click  Settings > Options >General > Configuration Parameters.
c) Set disk.EnableUUID to False.
d) Save the settings.
e) Power on the virtual machine.

Hope this helps.