Avamar Backup of a Windows VM fails with the error: Protocol error from VMX

Recently on a new install of Avamar version 6.1; I had a VMware Image based backup fail with error 10007. Upon further investigation of the backup job log I noticed that the snapshot failed with: A general system error occured: Protocol error from VMX. This is a good example of two very vague errors on both the backup system and the virtual infrastructure. So to further investigate we needed to look deeper into the vmware.log file…

Avamar Backup Job fails with error code 10007

I noticed a recent NDMP backup failed with error code 10007, here is the job log information:

2010-12-01 08:00:45 avndmp Error : Snapup of “ndmp-volume-name” aborted due to ‘Error during NDMP session’.
2010-12-01 08:00:45 avndmp Info : NDMP session result: avtar returned:176 ‘Fatal signal’ ndmp returned:157 ‘Miscellaneous error’
2010-12-01 08:00:45 avndmp Info : Final summary generated subwork 1, cancelled/aborted 1, snapview 0, exitcode 157
2010-12-01 08:00:45 avndmp FATAL : Fatal signal 11 in pid 21946
2010/12/01-08:00:45.23164 [avndmp_ctl_sup] FATAL ERROR: Fatal signal 11

[sociallocker id=”759″]I’m still investigating and will update the post when i find out the root cause.  [/sociallocker]