Challenge
Veeam incorrectly displays portgroups in Virtual Lab -> Settings -> Isolated Networks and when trying to add such a port group the following message box is displayed:Cause
It is a known VMware SDK limitation where special characters are not escaped when used in names of vSphere entities such as port groups. It might still be possible to add that port group as your production network in the Virtual Lab Properties -> isolated network settings, but the Surebackup job will not be able to match a port group with a special char to the production one resulting a Sure Backup job failure.It's also true for Hyper-V environments, characters to avoid are:
- the < is assumed to be the beginning of a tag;
- the & is assumed to be the beginning a entity reference.
Solution
To resolve this issue, you can override limitations set by implementing registry tweak on a Veeam Backup and Replication server.Key path: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Veeam\Veeam Backup and Replication
Value name: RestrictedNetworkSymbols
Value type: REG_SZ
Value data: ~`!@#$%^&*+=;'><|?*:\" - this is the default value. To fix the error, exclude symbols you would like to use. For example, if you would like to use "pipe" symbol in name set value data to: ~`!@#$%^&*+=;'><?*:\
The change will only apply after restart of Veeam Backup service. Make sure no jobs or tasks are running prior restart.