Exchange backup failure after upgrading to Symantec Backup Exec 2010
In a solid running environment with Symantec Backup Exec 12.5 and Exchange 2007, the daily backup job of Exchange started failing with following error, after upgrading to Backup Exec 2010 version:
Final error: 0xe000fed1 – A failure occurred querying the Writer status. Final error category: Resource Errors
Here are the steps I used to resolve the issue:
a) check event log on Exchange Server
– Event ID 9609 – Exchange VSS Writer (instance 904411c7-69b4-461b-9899-9e6dd5b07d52:135) failed with error code -2403 when preparing for Snapshot.
– Event ID 9840 – An attempt to prepare the storage group ‘First Storage Group’ for backup failed because the storage group is already in the process of being backed up. The error code is -2403. (Note that if a backup was recently aborted, then it may take several minutes for the system to detect the aborted backup and initiate backup cleanup procedures, so this message may be generated if an attempt was made to backup a storage group before a previous backup attempt had fully terminated.)
owkay, something is really going wrong 
b) a first check on Symantec support and Microsoft Technet leaded to the following suggestions:
– install hotfixes on Windows 2003 box (not relevant as it was fully patched)
– verify AOFO (open file option from Symantec) was installed (you can check this from ackup Exec – Tools – install remote agents and select the Exchange server; it gave a message in this wizard that the open was installed and running successfully; that’s not it
c) Another Microsoft KB (http://support.microsoft.com/kb/930800) suggested to dismount / remount the Exchange database, as well as verifying if VSS engine was running owkay
– dismounting store was not possible, as it alerted me the backup process was running; I made this possible by stopping the information store service (as was suggested as 2nd option in the same article)
Solution: restarting the Information Store or reboot Exchange Server, simple as that
(some further background investigation learned me that the VSS engine gets somehow updated / replaced by the Backup Exec AOFO engine upgrade from 12.5 to 2010, which requires a reboot apparently. Only drawback is that this is not mentioned during the remote agent upgrade…)
/Cheers, Peter