Recently one of our development servers crashed. Upon recovery we started to receive the following error messages when backing up the Microsoft SQL databases: “Unable to get the SQL Version for the server [DEVSERVER]. Please check if the SQL Services are running.”

It’s important to note:

• Before the crash the backups ran fine;
• the file “SQLServerInstanceList.txt” listed the following information: “(local);Clustered:No;Version:11.0.5058.0“;
• the SQLiDA log only mentions “Unable to get the SQL Version for the server“;
• the server has been restarted and the SQL iDataAgent has been reconfigured (removed keeping software in place and reconfigured).

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Recently we noticed a sudden increase in the completion time for two SQL related backups on two different servers. Other SQL servers were not experiencing the same issue. It caught our eye the affected systems were used for the same application.

• The first one is used for acceptation and test and contains approximately 450GB of data. Initially the backupjob completed after 4 hours, now it needed 10 hours to process and it still failed on 8 databases.
• The second one is used for production and contains approximately 1500GB of data. Initially the backupjob needed 15 hours, now it needed 27 hours and it still throws 11 failed database backups.

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