Acronis Backup does not see all VM running on Proxmox

[hnoack]

Hi everyone,

I'm not sure if I am in the right place, but let's try and see if anyone here has had the same issue already.

I'm using Acronis Cyber Protect for the backups of my virtual machines and it works pretty stable. With the latest driver update to 0.302, something changed for VSS and Acronis can no longer take backups with the client on the VM. So I thought we can use the Proxmox integration of Acronis and install a client on the host and get the backups that way.

The installation worked just fine, but Cyber Protect does not see all of my VMs. I only see the newer ones, but my oldest four VMs never show up in Acronis. It looks like that:



Those are Windows and Linux machines that are currently working with Acronis backup via Proxmox. I have eleven VMs total on my host:



Those four are Windows machines that are affected by the driver issue. PKI is also a Windows machine, but created way later than the four I marked red, but also has the driver issue.

So I'm not sure why Acronis cannot see those machines. They are all installed on ZFS, they are all configured in the same way regarding Proxmox.
Did anyone here have an issue like that before?

I have customer installations where it works just fine and I see all the machines without problems in Acronis. It's just not working on my machine :-(

 

[bbgeek17]

Hi @hnoack , welcome to the forum.

First question - have you reached out to Acronis support?
A total guess - the Acronis wants a particular QEMU version. Those VMs have been up for a while and were started with older QEMU binary. If the guess is somewhat correct - migrating these VMs to another host, or cold starting, may help.

---

Blockbridge : Ultra low latency all-NVME shared storage for Proxmox - https://www.blockbridge.com/proxmox

 

[hnoack]

Hi bbgeek17,

yes Acronis support is also looking into this, but they have not found the issue yet.
I installed the latest Proxmox updates today and will do a reboot of the host machine tonight. Let's see if that somehow helps.

I will report back.

 

[hnoack]

Did a cold start of all the machines after a host reboot, but it didn't change anything. I also got this info from Acronis, that a reboot or restart of the agent will rescan the VMs on the host. Still they are not all showing up. I think we might need to see some logs from the Acronis agent, but this is probably not the right place to ask. ;-)

Edit: found a workaround for the driver issue with 0.302 -> https://care.acronis.com/s/article/...ox-Windows-VMs-with-Device-is-not-ready-error

The key is to not use QEMU VSS for the time being and switch Acronis to Microsoft VSS for the backups.

 

[hnoack]

I found the issue, why the machines are not detected by Acronis. They are missing the vmgenid, which is created automatically in recent Proxmox versions.
This is the solution:

VMGenID (Virtual Machine Generation ID) is a unique 128-bit GUID assigned to a virtual machine and exposed to the guest operating system. It enables the hypervisor to notify the guest OS when significant VM changes occur, such as cloning, snapshot restoration, or recovery.

To verify whether a VM has a VMGenID configured, run the following command on the Proxmox host:

qm config <VMID> | grep vmgenid

Please note that VMGenID is generally not required for Acronis backup operations. However, for Windows Domain Controllers running on Proxmox, VMGenID allows Active Directory to detect VM restores and helps prevent USN rollback issues after snapshot recoveries.

If the VMGenID is missing, you can assign a new one by following these steps:

Generate a new UUID:
Shell
uuidgen
Assign the generated UUID as the VMGenID:
Shell
qm set <VMID> --vmgenid <UUID>

Example:

Shell
qm set 100 --vmgenid 2f7e8d8a-5e6b-4e88-a3f4-123456789abc

After assigning the VMGenID, restart the virtual machine and perform a new discovery from the Acronis console to verify whether the VM is detected successfully.