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.”
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.
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.
Verifying vCenter also revealed nothing out of the ordinary. The tags all looked fine.
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.
After manually starting the service, all backups using Tag Combination started working again.