Veeam / VCentre - 503 server unavailable - connection error

[CapnPugwash]

I've had an issue with Veeam being incredibly slow to open 'file level restore' window. Both Veeam and myself think that this is a DB issue, they've created a clean DB and attempted to add my VCentre server in backup infrastructure - they get a 'The Remote Server returned an error - 503 server unavailable' message

 

On the backup server they can ping VCentre, they can also open a browser and log into it. The VCentre client is on the backup machine and can be connected to without issue.

 

Because they can't connect they have had to roll back to the previous DB, even though I have restore issues I can at least run backups from this. It does strike me as odd that in this DB there exists a working connection to VCentre , although id I try and add an individual host, I get the 503 error

 

All my VMs and VCentre appear to be working fine

[CapnPugwash]

In case anyone is following...

 

Restarted VCenter / VMware management services - no change.

 

Took all the VMs off a Host, restarted it, re-added the hosts & tried to add it to Veeam Backup Infrastructure - no change.

 

Also had a third party dig deep into our VMware set up with PowerCLI and they can't find anything wrong

 

Googling '503 server unavailable' get's me a mix of things , ranging from HTTP to DNS errors ... I'm flummoxed!

[CapnPugwash]

OK, hopefully this will prove useful to someone...

 

It looks like it is a self-cert issue.

 

I thought VMware console was available over the web but when I actually try to login I get an SSL error.

 

Using Veeam logs I can see the login transaction failing at:

Veeam.Backup.Satellite.CSatelliteViSoapConnectorServiceStub.GetCertificate(String host, Int32 port)

 

Veeam engineer has pointed me at some KB articles & it seems fairly straightforward

https://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=2033338

 

The reason my current Veeam setup with the dodgy DB connects to VCentre OK is because the connection existed before there was an SSL issue - as it's already connected Veeam doesn't execute this line of code : Veeam.Backup.Satellite.CSatelliteViSoapConnectorServiceStub.GetCertificate(String host, Int32 port)

 

I'm still flummoxed though... How did this happen?

 

The only thing that has changed is in summer, we swapped out two of our hosts for new ones. VMware didn't issue any cert warnings...