NVP vProxy: Unable to find the selected VM work item with UUID "UUID" in vCenter, the work item will be skipped.

• A VM protection policy is being marked as failed but all VMs show successful.
• The protection group backed up in the failed workflow has VMs statically (checked) assigned. 
• The action details report the following 

Unable to find selected VM work item with UUID "##-UUID-##" in vCenter, the work item will be skipped.

This behavior is by design. The VMs were manually checked into (statically assigned) to the protection group. The virtual machine has been deleted/decommissioned from the vCenter inventory. The NetWorker resource database (nsrdb) stores the virtual machine by UUID and performs a lookup of the virtual machine at the start of the backup workflow. There is no process in the vCenter that instructs NetWorker to remove the UUID from the nsrdb when the VM is removed from the vCenter.

1. You can identify the VM name and protection group it belongs to by running mminfo commands against the UUID on the NetWorker server:

Syntax: mminfo -kot -r name,vmname,ssid 
Example:

C:\Users\Administrator.AMER>mminfo -kot -r name,vmname,group,ssid | findstr 5027e482-8bdf-a536-98ec-f2d5fa9bf390
name                          vm_name   group       ssid
vm:5027e482-8bdf-a536-98ec-f2d5fa9bf390:vcsa.amer.lan MYVM01 VMware_Weekly 3987452358

2. The nsrpolicy command-line utility can be used to remove the missing UUID from the protection group:

Syntax: nsrpolicy group update vmware -g "GROUP_NAME" -O "UUID"
Example: 

C:\Users\Administrator.AMER>nsrpolicy group update vmware -g "VMware_Weekly" -O "5027e482-8bdf-a536-98ec-f2d5fa9bf390"
133584:nsrpolicy: Group 'VMware_Weekly' was successfully updated

Dynamic Rule Association

Alternatively, NetWorker VMware Protection (NVP) groups can be configured to use "Dynamic Rule Association." This method entails either configuring "name-based" rules in NetWorker, or VMware category tag assignment. At the time of backup the rules are used to identify which VMware VMs should be backed up in the group. This method allows for VMs to be added to or removed from the VMware protection workflow without being statically assigned in the NetWorker resource database. As such, the issue outlined in this article does not occur when using dynamic rule-based association. For more information, see:

• • NetWorker: vProxy: How to enable a VMware group with Dynamic Association and Rules?
  • NVP vProxy: Category Tagging based VMware Protection

NVP-vProxy: Backups marked as failed but all VMs were successful "Unable to find selected vCenter container work item with ID "vm-MOREF"

Flags can be added to the mminfo command to pull additional data if needed. See the mminfo section of the NetWorker Command Reference Guide, available through: https://www.dell.com/support/product-details/product/networker/docs