NVP-vProxy: VM Backup Status Shows Failed When No VMs are Present in the Group

Summary: Empty VMware groups report failure in backups.

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Symptoms

  • The NetWorker VMware Protection integration is configured with the vProxy Appliance.
  • The VMware Protection Group is configured using Dynamic Association with Rules to determine which virtual machines and containers are dynamic in the group.
  • In a dynamic environment, the tagging may not return any VMs resulting in an empty group. The backup action status is marked as failed with the following errors:
DD/MM/YYYY HH:MM:SS Getting list of VM work items. 
DD/MM/YYYY HH:MM:SS No VM selected as part of static selection.
DD/MM/YYYY HH:MM:SS No excluded VM's are present. 
DD/MM/YYYY HH:MM:SS No VMs obtained for Backup. Verify the static and rule based dynamic associations for VM selection. 
DD/MM/YYYY HH:MM:SS Action backup vmware-vproxy 'backup' with job id 320010 is exiting with status 'failed', exit code 1 
DD/MM/YYYY HH:MM:SS Action has finished with failures.

Cause

This behavior was introduced as a result of designed code changes. The purpose of this failure is to warn the backup administrator that a backup group is configured which contains no resources to be backed up.

Resolution

NOTE: New changes were introduced 19.9.0.2 to allow masking this error or warning to be marked as successful. NetWorker 19.8 and prior are End of Support Life (EOSL). Ensure the NetWorker server is 19.9.0.2 or later, and perform the steps outlined below.

The following environment variable must be set to ignore empty VMware protection groups and mark them as successful.

NSR_VPROXY_SUCCESS_ON_NO_VMS_FOUND=TRUE 

Windows:

  1. Add a new variable on the NetWorker server under Environment variables > System Variables named as below and specify a value of TRUE, as follows:
NSR_VPROXY_SUCCESS_ON_NO_VMS_FOUND
screenshot of new variable created
  1. Reboot the NetWorker server for the changes to take effect.

Linux:

  1. Add the following lines to the /nsr/nsrrc file:
NSR_VPROXY_SUCCESS_ON_NO_VMS_FOUND=TRUE
export NSR_VPROXY_SUCCESS_ON_NO_VMS_FOUND
  1. Connect to nsradmin:
nsradmin -p nsrexec
  1. Select or Print the 'NSRLA' resource:
p type: nsrla
  1. Append the attribute:
append environment variable names: NSR_VPROXY_SUCCESS_ON_NO_VMS_FOUND
  1. Select or Print the 'NSRLA' resource again to verify your changes:
p type: nsrla
  1. Restart NetWorker services for the changes to take effect:
systemctl stop networker
systemctl start networker


After these changes are applied, the following logging is expected for empty groups:

DD/MM/YYYY HH:MM:SS Getting list of VM work items. 
DD/MM/YYYY HH:MM:SS No VM selected as part of static selection.
DD/MM/YYYY HH:MM:SS No excluded VM's are present. 
DD/MM/YYYY HH:MM:SS No VMs obtained for Backup. Verify the static and rule based dynamic associations for VM selection. 
DD/MM/YYYY HH:MM:SS Action backup vmware-vproxy 'backup' with job id 384021 is exiting with status 'did not run', exit code 0 
DD/MM/YYYY HH:MM:SS Action has finished successfully.

Additional Information

Affected Products

NetWorker

Products

NetWorker Family
Article Properties
Article Number: 000221209
Article Type: Solution
Last Modified: 03 Dec 2025
Version:  3
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