AIO SB600C with SBS 2008 Exchange Snapshots

[Jonathan Haase]

I posted previously about having issues getting my Exchange Messages stores from my SBS 2008 server hosted on the AIO SB600C box, and my work around there to get that going.

So now I'm past that, and my AIO is hosting my exchange message store, however Snapshots are completely broken. If I try to take a snapshot the task viewer on the Create snapshot job will show that it failes on the second step of "Create Snapshot Set". The details from the AIO side of things are pretty sparse, basically only saying that the job execution failed.

The application log on the SBS server will end up showing a lot of VSS errors.

I see several EventID 8194's "Unexpected Error Querying for IVssWriterCallback interface. hr=0x80070005, however these are all for other VSS writers than what we are dealing with here. A couple for sharepoint, one for the "System Writer", one for the TS Gateway.

Then I see an event ID 12333
Volume Shadow Copy Warning: The provider has reported a storage identifier that is not supported by VSS. Codeset: 1 Type: 8 Size: 70 NextOffset: 88 Association: 1 This identifier will be skipped by VSS.

Operation:
Check If Volume Is Supported by Provider
Check If Volume Is Supported by Provider
Add a Volume to a Shadow Copy Set

Context:
Execution Context: Provider
Provider Name: Microsoft iSCSI Target VSS Hardware Provider
Provider Version: 3.1.3468
Provider ID: {2f900f90-00e9-440e-873a-96ca5eb079e5}
Volume Name: \\?\Volume{d2dbef60-13d7-11de-a1bd-00155dff0a01}\
Snapshot Context: 32
Execution Context: Coordinator
Provider ID: {00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000}
Volume Name: C:\Data Volumes\Mailbox Database 2\
Execution Context: Coordinator

Followed by Event ID 6
The iSCSI Software Target Volume Shadow Copy Service Hardware Provider service could not prepare the snapshot for LUN 0x00000000 on (null). 0x800706ba.

Any clues where to start on this... Luckily I'm not in production yet, as it would really suck to not be getting these snapshots for backup purposes.

[Jonathan Haase]

Update..

Figured this one out.. For now at least..

Windows Firewall. I had already disabled it on the SBS 2008 server to solve some other issues, however the Group policy stuff that comes out of the box on SBS 2008 enables it on client servers and pc's. Turned off the windows firewall on the AIO server, and now the snapshots complete properly... Now if I can just figure out what ports to allow...