Veeam B&R V9 – Timed Out Waiting For Guest Interaction Proxy

Veeam Backup & Replication V9 was released on the 12th of January 2016 and brings a host of new features, including a new feature called the Guest Interaction Proxy (For more details on this visit https://www.veeam.com/blog/v9-robo-and-tape-backup-enterprise-enhancements.html).

This new feature allows you to offload the guest interaction process to your proxies / hosts and reduce the load on the Veeam Backup Server. Having gone through the upgrade I started running my backup & replication jobs and noted that some jobs were failing due to the following error:

“Failed to prepare guests for volume snapshot”
This error was preceded in all cases by the line “Failed to inventory guest system: Timed out waiting for guest interaction proxy”.

Screenshot of error

After checking each of my jobs I found that the upgrade had set the Guest Interaction Proxy on each of the jobs to be my Veeam Backup Server for any jobs which were application aware. In each of the cases spreading the load to another proxy server resolved the issue, so I needed to update all of my jobs to set the Guest Interaction Proxy to the automatic setting and thus distribute based on current load.

To do so simply run these few lines of PowerShell from within either the local Veeam Backup Server PS instance or remotely using the Veeam Backup and Replication PowerShell Toolkit (obviously after connecting to your Veeam Server instance);

$Jobs = Get-VBRJob

# Start loop for each job
foreach ($Job in $Jobs)
{
	# Obtain the current VSS Options assigned
	$VSSOptions = (Get-VBRJob -name $Job.name).VSSOptions
	# Modify the GuestProxyAutoDetect value, setting it to True
	$VSSOptions.GuestProxyAutoDetect = $true
	# Apply updated VSS Options
	Set-VBRJobVSSOptions -Job $Job -Options $VSSOptions
}

Screenshot post proxy change

A nice quick fix applied and my application aware jobs are now processing normally without failure.