Veeam Backup & Replication is great tool for when you don’t have vCenter available for whatever reason and you need to move some VMs and/or datastores. It has bailed me out of many sticky situations in the past. However in my most recent bind, I found I absolutely could not get it to connect directly to my new ESXi 6 hosts. I had no issues getting Veeam to connect to vCenter 6 or ESXi 5.5, it was only when connecting directly to ESXi 6 hosts I would get the following error:
Failed to login to “192.168.xxx.xxx” by SOAP, port 443, user “root”, proxy srv port:0
Unknown API version format: “dev”
After googling around and trying a few things out I found I had to do 2 things – First upgrade Veeam Backup and Replication to version 8 Update 2, which is just a simple download and install. Next I had to enable SSL v3 for the authd service on my ESXi hosts. Now in my opinion, this is a bit disheartening that SSLv3 not being enabled by default on ESXi 6 completely cripples Veeam. In any hosting environment that takes security even relatively seriously, this should be one of the first things disabled on all of your servers. At least it is easy to enable and disable SSLv3 on the ESXi side.
To enable SSL v3 support for the authd service 902 on ESXi 6:
1.) Connect via SSH (Note SSH is not enabled by default on ESXi)
2.) Type vi /etc/vmware/config at the command prompt
3.) Find some space and press i then Enter to edit the file then add the following line: vmauthd.ssl.noSSLv3 = “FALSE” SSH into ESXi Host
4.) Hit ESC and then type :x and Enter to exit saving the changes
5.) Then use the following command to restart the rhttpproxy service: /etc/init.d/rhttpproxy restart
