Force Hyper-V VM backup to use System VSS
I was preparing a hyper-v backup on a demo environment.
I only needed to backup one VM, so configuring the HP Lefthand VSS writer was not really needed.
But when performing a backup in DPM, I received the following error:
Affected area: \Backup Using Child Partition Snapshot\restoreserver
Occurred since: 3/17/2011 9:51:28 AM
Description: The replica of Microsoft Hyper-V \Backup Using Child Partition Snapshot\restoreserver on SCVMM restoreserver Resources.hypervCL.vbox.local is inconsistent with the protected data source. All protection activities for data source will fail until the replica is synchronized with consistency check. You can recover data from existing recovery points, but new recovery points cannot be created until the replica is consistent.
For SharePoint farm, recovery points will continue getting created with the databases that are consistent. To backup inconsistent databases, run a consistency check on the farm. (ID 3106)
Failure occurred while adding one or more of the volumes involved in backup operation to snapshot set. Please check the event log on SCVMM restoreserver Resources.hypervCL.vbox.local to troubleshoot the issue. (ID 30290 Details: Internal error code: 0x80990A00)
Recommended action: Check recent records from the VolSnap source in the Application Event Log to find out why the problem occurred.
Synchronize with consistency check.
Resolution: To dismiss the alert, click below
Inactivate alert
The hyper-v server was trying to use the unconfigured hardware VSS writer, which was obviously not working.
I needed to force all hyper-v servers to use the software vss provider.
This can be done by adding the following registery key on the hyper-v host systems:
[HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Microsoft Data Protection Manager\Agent\UseSystemSoftwareProvider]
Reboot is not needed.
Do not forget to configure serialization as described in this technet article: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff634192.aspx