Recently, I ran into a problem where my backup stopped working. Everything seemed fine; I could log in to the VMware vCenter server, all the virtual machines were there, but the backup just wouldn’t run. The error message I got in the backup job was: “Tags Combination Daily-backup & Production is unavailable. VMs residing on it will be skipped from processing.”
![](https://i0.wp.com/alt64.se/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/image-2.png?resize=525%2C389&ssl=1)
I’ve built some of my backup jobs to use Tags Combination as the selection process for the backup job in Veeam Backup & Replication. All VMs with the correct combination of vCenter Tags will be backed up. In this specific job, I was using a tag called “Daily-backup” and another called “Production”, so as long as a VM is assigned both tags, it will be backed up.
![](https://i0.wp.com/alt64.se/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/image.png?resize=525%2C375&ssl=1)
Did something happen with the tags assigned to the VMs? I logged in to vCenter to verify the tags. Clearly, the VMs still had the correct tags assigned.
![](https://i0.wp.com/alt64.se/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/image-1.png?resize=280%2C339&ssl=1)
Verifying vCenter also revealed nothing out of the ordinary. The tags all looked fine.
![](https://i0.wp.com/alt64.se/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/image-4.png?resize=525%2C444&ssl=1)
All other jobs not using Tags were working without any problems. So, the next step was to verify that all services were running on the vCenter appliance. I logged in to the vCenter VAMI at https://<vcenter-fqdn>:5480, and lo and behold, the vAPI endpoint service was not started.
![](https://i0.wp.com/alt64.se/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/image-5.png?resize=525%2C70&ssl=1)
After manually starting the service, all backups using Tag Combination started working again.
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