Socket count troubleshooting for VMware / ESXi hosts

Situation

Backup plan for VMware / ESXi instances fails during the run, or cannot be created / edited due to an error similar to the one below:

This error might be an indication of the lack of correspondence between VMware / ESXi host's IP address and FQDN name on the operating system level, which the MSP360 Backup software checks for licensing purposes (as of release 7.8; further improvements are planned for this procedure in the future updates for the MSP360 Backup software).

Solution

For troubleshooting purposes, first please open the elevated Windows command line interface and enter the following command:

ipconfig /flushdns

After that, navigate to the following location on the machine where the issue was encountered:

%windir%\system32\drivers\etc\hosts

Open the "hosts" file for editing with any text processor (for that you will need local Windows administratore privileges), then add a line to the file using the following principle:

[your ESXi server's IP address] [your ESXi server's FQDN name]

To illustrate, based on example from the error message above, the line added to the "hosts" file should look like this:

192.168.102.22 esxi1.vmware1.local

Once the line is added, make sure to save the changes to the "hosts" file.

After that, retry the VM backup plan creation / editing / running in order to confirm results of the troubleshooting.