Afternoon,

Had a very peculiar error message when deploying SureBackup and the internet couldn’t give me any meaningful results! So I thought time to add to the collective world of knowledge with a blog post.

Scenario:

Onboarding customer for a managed backup solution, configuring SureBackup to ensure all backups are validated prior to sending to our cloud solution (Nexus Cloud Connect if you’re interested) and two VMs were failing with an “Invalid Change Tracker Error Code”. I connected to VMware and could see that this was the message being passed to Veeam from vCenter.

Browsing the log files uncovered that this was actually a symptom of an issue, but the root cause was something completely unrelated. If you review the Task log file (Commonly C:\ProgramData\Veeam\Backup\<BackupJobName>\Task.<VMName>.<GUID>.log) , search for the word “Error” in  your favourite text editor, the first line I saw was “Nested Hardware-Assisted Virtualization should be enabled when enabling VBS (Virtualization-Based Security)”.

Further reading on VBS and how it works generally and with the vSphere environment is available here and here.

Thankfully there’s a quick fix for this, open Regedit, create a key of: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Veeam\Veeam Backup and Replication\SureBackup if it doesn’t already exist and within there we will create a new DWORD, this is to be called “UseVhvEnable” and needs to be set to a value of 0.

Once this is done, reboot your Veeam server and try to rerun your SureBackup. You should find it now works!