SERVER 2022: Random failures with: Windows Backup failed to get an exclusive lock on the EFI system partition (ESP)

No, we run VMWare on Lenovo servers.

We haven't solved the issue through Microsoft support yet, but a workaround from MS has been applied, and there's been no WSB fails the last week.

(Note that in addition to this workaround, I wrote a script that checks the status of the VSS writers and writes it to a file, and is scheduled to run just before the WSB task, and 10 and 20 minutes into the task. Not that I can see why this would have any impact on the WSB task...)

Applied workaround:

1. Open “Run” and enter “taskchd.msc” to launch Task Scheduler.

 

2. Navigate to Microsoft/Windows/Backup

          

3. Select Microsoft-Windows-WindowsBackup, right click, select properties and navigate to the Settings tab.

 

4. Check the box “Allow task to be run on demand”
5. You can try to select the box “If this task fails”. If this makes your backup work then you can stop here, if this doesn’t work follow the next steps.

 

 6. Click “OK“ to apply all the changes.

 

7. Open cmd and type this command:

schtasks /create /F /RU SYSTEM /RL HIGHEST /SC onevent /EC Application /MO "*[System[Provider[@Name='Microsoft-Windows-Backup'] and (EventID=5)]]" /TN "Microsoft\Windows\Backup\Retry_Backup" /TR "schtasks /run /tn "Microsoft\Windows\Backup\Microsoft-Windows-WindowsBackup""

 

8. Refresh the Backup folder in task scheduler.

          

 Note: on the command the “EventID = 5” section makes the scheduled task search for the backup failing with that event id. If for some reason the id changes then you’ll need to search for the new eventid in the event log and change it to the new eventid.

Thanks for that I will try that in my case the failing backup id on the first 2 servers I check are Event ID *517* just FYI,

Ps the first suggestion on retry on the actual task of the backup, I think, would only make a difference if the task failed to run in this instance the task it self executes , however the result is a fail , I had already tried this in the early days of this issue and thought better of it.

Moving on to your second suggested task schedule looking for the explicit fail on backup running is a good idea and i will try it !!

Are all these servers that are having issues, Dell servers? Mine is. Poweredge 550.

I dont see the reboot issue you describe

Yes , I have found 99.9 % of the time the manual version runs however I have had some of them fail , run it again straight after a manual fail then it goes , its just got no logic to it