Some Windows VMs (not all) fail to backup since upgrading to VMware plugin v2.1.80.
If the previous plugin is installed (e.g. v2.1.58) these same VMs are successfully backed up.
Fault Tolerance is not enabled or started on any VM, and manual snapshot of these VMs is also successful.
The binary log shows:
Error 2012/04/18 12:11:55 274 Data Plugin NAM Failed to determine information for VM from the server
Context:
Module/Thread Id Code Time Message
VMWVIM :01780 32 0 111155 Successfully retrieved MORef '464' for uuid '564e5cd9-610e-e1bc-f3c4-2af36adcf4f2'
VMWVIM :01780 98 0 111155 Api version of web service is '4.1'
VMWVIM :01780 35 0 111155 Preparing to fetch props for a VM
VMWVIM :01780 710 0 111155 GetPropertiesForFirstIteration invoked
VMWVIM :01780 98 0 111155 Api version of web service is '4.1'
VMWVIM :01780 711 0 111155 Gonna get first set of properties
VMWVIM :01780 701 0 111155 Failed to get first set of properties: 4
VMWVIM :01780 29 0 111155 Soap error is (null)
VMWVIM :01780 214 0 111155 Failed to fetch props for a VM
During backup, the VMware plug-in gathers information about the VMs from the vSphere web service.
This information is used to make decisions and facilitate the rest of the backup.
Among this information set collected by the plugin, the VMs netbios settings are now included since vSphere 4.1 if WINS is enabled on a VM.
Netbios settings are represented within the VMware WSDL for the web service as a polymorphic data type.
The VMware plugin uses a version of gSOAP that has issues handling polymorhic data types.
gSOAP is a third-party software used to interact with the VMware Web services.
The previous plugin was developed using the vSphere 4.0 API which doesn't provide the netbios settings for VMs when queried.
We have confirmed this issue as a defect and it will be addressed in a future version of the VMware plugin.
In the meantime, continue using VMware plugin version 2.1.58. Alternatively and if possible at all, to use the current VMware plugin 2.1.80, do not configure WINS on the specific failing VMs. When WINS is not configured on a VM guest, the (sub-)objects sent by the web service in the soap response to the VMware plugin, do not include the netbios settings.
