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Failed To Prepare Guest Veeam Guest Agent Is Not Started - Virtualization Howto

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Failed To Prepare Guest Veeam Guest Agent Is Not Started - Virtualization Howto

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amsilvatailor
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13/06/2023, 13:29 Failed to prepare guest Veeam Guest Agent is not started - Virtualization Howto

Backup Software

Failed to prepare guest Veeam


Guest Agent is not started
 brandon.lee • February 28, 2017  1 minute read

 vbrhot01

If you run into the error in Veeam “Failed to prepare guest


Veeam Guest AGent is not started”, often there is an issue with
the VMware Tools service. If VMware tools is in a bad state,
when application aware is enabled, you will see issues with the
backup job including the aforementioned error.

Failed to prepare guest Veeam


Guest Agent is not started
When looking through the event logs of the server in question
that had issues with the Veeam backup, I found errors in the
event logs for VMware tools service.

https://www.virtualizationhowto.com/2017/02/failed-to-prepare-guest-veeam-guest-agent-is-not-started/#:~:text=If you run into the,job including the aforeme… 1/4


13/06/2023, 13:29 Failed to prepare guest Veeam Guest Agent is not started - Virtualization Howto

Notice on the backup job for this particular VM, we see the
warning “VMware Tools are not running. Guest processing
skipped” as well as the “Failed to prepare guest for hot
backup. Error: Veeam Guest Agent is not started” error.

https://www.virtualizationhowto.com/2017/02/failed-to-prepare-guest-veeam-guest-agent-is-not-started/#:~:text=If you run into the,job including the aforeme… 2/4


13/06/2023, 13:29 Failed to prepare guest Veeam Guest Agent is not started - Virtualization Howto

Resolution
The resolution to the issue above for me was to restart the
VMware tools service. When I attempted in this case to restart
the VMware tools service, it failed to start in a timely fashion.
However, manually attempting to start it was successful.

Restart-Service "VMware Tools"

If you run into an instance where you can’t stop a service and it
is hung in the stopping state, you can find the PID the service is
using and then kill the process which will kill the service as well.
Find the PID number using the command below and then kill it.

sc queryex VMTools

taskkill /f /pid <PID number>

Other troubleshooting VMware tools may also be uninstalling


VMware Tools and then reinstalling.

Thoughts
If you run into the error Failed to prepare guest Veeam Guest
Agent is not started, looking at services and especially VMware
Tools state is a great place to start. Once you have made sure
VMware Tools is in a good state – service is running, no errors in
event viewer, you should be able to kick off the affected backup
job and it should complete successfully with application aware
settings turned on.

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13/06/2023, 13:29 Failed to prepare guest Veeam Guest Agent is not started - Virtualization Howto

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Victor Bezrukov − ⚑
5 years ago

thank you for the info !

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