Troubleshooting Netbackup for VMWare Application State Capture (ASC) job failures


Troubleshooting Application State Capture (ASC) job failures
The Application State Capture (ASC) job fails and the databases are not protected if you do any of the following:
• Disable the Virtual Machine quiesce option.
• Select the Exclude data disks option.

As long as there are any databases that can be protected, the ASC job continues. If you select databases for backup that exist on supported and on unsupported disks, the ASC job produces a status 1 (partially successful). The ASC job detects these situations and the job details include the result of the backup operation.
SharePoint Server databases are not cataloged and backed up if they exist on the following:
• Raw device mapping (RDMs). Make sure that the SharePoint virtual machine does not use RDM as storage for databases.
• Virtual Machine Disk (vmdk) volumes that are marked as independent. Make sure that the SharePoint databases are not stored on independent disks.
• Mount point volumes.
• Virtual hard disks (VHDs). If NetBackup detects any database objects on a VHD, the ASC job fails and no SharePoint content is cataloged. This exclusion includes any objects that do not exist on the VHD.
• Any components that reside on a physical machine are not backed up with the VMware backup.

These limitations are because of what VMware does/does not do. Also, the ASC job does output a message to the activity monitor stating whether or not the application is protected.
If the SharePoint Application Backup fails, if possible check if the Native SharePoint Backup succeeds; if it’s a client connect failure then native SharePoint backup would also fail. Then we can rule ASC job out of picture.