Hi, I've a EQL (now running 7.1.4 fw) with a four nodes Hyper-V 2012 cluster.

4.7.0 HIT are installed on these servers and the cluster is backed up using DPM 2012 (with EQL HW provider). The vms run only Windows Server 2008 R2 or Windows 2012 as guest OS.

The problem is that some virtual machines are being correctly backed up by DPM: the backup starts, the Hyper-V host creates a snapshot that I can see in the EQL Group Manager and then the snapshot is deleted when the backup job ends.

Unluckily, other vms can't be backed up. When the backup job starts, no snapshot is being created and on the Hyper-V where the vm runs I can see only some VSS errors in the event log. The error code provided means that the storage array refuses to create a snapshot due to a provider veto. Then the backup fails.

I don't know where the problem could be: the "bad" vms reside on the same host as the "good" ones and even a live migration doesn't solve the problem. Maybe it's not a host-related problem... . On some "bad" vms MSSQL is installed, but on other "bad" vms is not; on the other hand, SQL is installed on some "good" vms.

So far I tried to reboot the vms. the hosts and the DPM too, but without success, so I can exclude a transient VSS error. I tried to upgrade the EQL fw from 7.0.4 to 7.1.4, but again no success.

I found a post on Technet Forums where the solution seems to be to stop the EqlASMAgent [EqualLogic Auto-Snapshot Manager Agent] on the hosts. Could be this a viable solution?

I don't know how to troubleshoot this issue, any idea?

Thanks in advance.