Checkpoint Creation Failed (code 1915)

Situation

A Hyper-V backup plan finishes with the following error: WMI error. Checkpoint creation failed.

Cause

This error may have several causes (they are described below in the Solution section):

• Cluster Service is disabled on the guest VM.
• SQL VSS Writer on the guest VM is in a non-retriable state or rejects events.
• Internal VM issues preventing snapshot creation, which may be reflected in VM event logs (for example, stuck COM+ Event System/VSS services).

Solution

For Hyper-V Cluster Backup plans

If the backup plan that produces this error includes a Hyper-V cluster, check if the Cluster service is running on the guest VM.

In an elevated PowerShell prompt, execute:

Get-VM | Format-List Name, ID

Find the name of the failed VM to learn its ID. Once you have the failed VM ID (VM_ID in the example below), open the PowerShell prompt again and execute:

Icacls "[path_to_virtual_machine_xml_files]\[VM_ID].xml" /grant "NT VIRTUAL MACHINE[VM_ID]:(OI)F"

If the issue persists, try to manually create checkpoints for the failing virtual machine using Hyper-V Manager. In this case, the probable cause of the issue may be insufficient VM/HDD IOPS capacity.