Another Veeam 9.5 U3a with VMware vSphere 6.7 U2 trick

In a previous post I posted back in december 2018 (CLICK HERE) we experienced issues while using on of our Veeam 9.5U3a environments together with VMware vSphere 6.7 U1. Since time has passed and Veeam has released support for vSphere 6.7 U1 (Veeam 9.5 U4) and vSphere 6.7 U2 (Veeam 9.5 U4a) you should have already upgraded Veeam and removed the previously mentioned workaround.

Since this particular environment cannot be easily upgraded we are still on Veeam version 9.5 U3a and we continued using it. As of late I’ve been getting the same messages which we received with vSphere 6.7 U1, messages like below:

Processing VM1 Error: Object reference not set to an instance of an object.
Processing VM2 Error: Object reference not set to an instance of an object.
Processing VM3 Error: Object reference not set to an instance of an object.

It didn’t instantaneously trigger anything with me so I once again started to troubleshoot the logs and try and find out why this happend. Until I googled my own previous blog post! After this I checked the VMware vCenter environment that we were targeting and ofcourse the customer upgraded his VMware vCenter environment to version 6.7 U2 without mentioning it to us!

Since this environment couldn’t easily be upgraded I started looking at solutions, but couldn’t actually find anything this time. But then I started thinking, with the previous workaround we were able to have Veeam use the vSphere 6.7 API to enable our replications again. Would this work another time with the newer VMware vCenter API?

So there we go again; look up the previously made registry key (if you still have it), or create it again:

Location: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Veeam\Veeam Backup and Replication
Key type: Multi-String Value (REG_MULTI_SZ)
Value: VMwareOverrideApiVersion
Data: 6.7.2=6.7

But this time, instead of using “6.7.1=6.7“, use “6.7.2=6.7“. Again make sure there are no spaces in the “Data” field, apply the registry and reboot the Veeam Backup Server Service.

And sure enough, everything is working smoothly again. Just like last time please make sure you remove the registry once you’ve updated to Veeam 9.5 U4. And remember that this is ofcourse officialy not supported! I thought to share this with you guys since I couldn’t find any mentions on the web that this workaround also works for vSphere 6.7 U2.

Back to your backups/replications!

**Edited and updated with new findings on 2020-06-18.