Hi.

We are designing a new infrastructure, where the following question arose:

When using SAN based backup via vStorage I assume the backup server (physical machine with

fc controller) needs to share a fc zone with the storage device where the datastores are located?

What about lun mapping - does the backup server need the datatore luns to be

mapped for access (I assume yes)? Will read only access work here?

Do the ESXi hosts or the VCenter need to share a fc zone with the backup server (I assume no)?

Anything else we have to be aware of?

Thanks for your suggestions.

Cheers.

hi everyone,

Is it possible to put more than one mail destination in ghettoVCB.conf when backup is finished?

EMAIL_TO=toto@mydomain.com;titi@mydomain.com doesn't work.

Thanks !

Hi Everyone

Hope this is the right section to post in - looks ok to me.

I am trying to setup a HP Data Protector 6.20 Cell Mgr on a VM. The VM sits on an ESXi 5.0 farm. Running 2008 R2.

I have got the SAN guys to zone the 2 tape drives to the physical hosting severs for the VM farm so I can then map the drives into the VM running the cell mgr. I am told that this tape library (HP StorageWorks MSL4048 2 Drive LTO4 FC 4gb library) does not have a medium exhanger/robotics component to zone - aparently this comes down with Tape Drive 1 and this allows control of the tape library.

I can see the tape drives OK, my issue is I cannot see any of the Robotics or Medium Exchanger for the library. I am told that the robots should come down the same path as the first tape drive - but I can't see it.

Has anybody experienced this issue or tried doing this with a VM based HP Data Protector Cell mgr and a HP StorageWorks MSL4048 2 Drive LTO4 FC 4gb library?

Many Thanks

Ryan

Hi all,

We have some servers running InterSystems Caché databases that are not VSS-compatible. We're using a VM backup solution (Veeam) to create quiesced backups of the VMs.

I have made pre-freeze and post-thaw scripts to quiesce the databases which work fine.

I'm currently testing the error handling behaviour. If for whatever reason we can't quiesce the database we want the backup to fail. I have read many reports of people whose attempts to create quiesced snapshots failed because their pre-freeze or post-thaw scripts returned a non-zero error code, so I thought this would be straight forward to set up.

However no matter what I do I can't make the snapshot operation fail. It looks as though VMware Tools can't detect the value returned by the batch scripts, or at least that it doesn't act on them if they're over 0. I've tried batch files with the following:

1. exit /b 1

2. notepad nonexistentfile.txt

3. notarealcommand

I've also tried a batch script with just 'pause' in an effort to meet some built in time out.

Nothing I do makes the snapshot operation fail. hostd.log reports that the batch file ran successfully each time.

Does anyone know how I can let VMware Tools know that the operation has failed? The utility we use to suspend the Caché database returns errorlevels we can act on appropriately in the batch, but we can't get that information back to vSphere to fail the snapshot operation.

We are running ESXi 4.1 build 582267

The VMware Tools version is 8.3.12 build 559003

The guest OS for the systems I'm testing is Windows Server 2008 R2 with SP1

Curiously, contrary to the VMware documentation, VMware Tools attempts to run C:\Windows\pre-freeze-script.bat and C:\Windows\post-thaw-script.bat instead of C:\Program Files\VMware\VMware Tools\backupScripts.d\*.* when we take a quiesced snapshot. I don't know if this is related.

I've not logged a service request yet as there's some mix up with our service contract and who is allowed to log cases on it.

Any help would be great.

Thanks,

Tom Browning

Dear all,

I am using ESXi 3.5 (Free version) and I am triailing Veeam Backup & Replication. The most I can get out of it is 5 - 6 Mb/s My VM is 570GB and the whole thing is taking 25 odd hours.

Is this a limitation to the free version or have I go something wrong??

Hi,

We are running 2 ESXI host having 4 VM each.Running file server,database server etc.Data is  on shared storage HP EVA 6000.

We are looking for some backup and disaster reecovery solution.Not something creating a DR site.

Looking for expert opinion on this.

Regards,

Sushil

Had a working vCenter and did DR backup with Symantec Backup Exec.

Restored the backup to a different drive on the same server.

Everything works except vCenter - service is not starting:

The description for Event ID 1000 from source VMware VirtualCenter Server cannot be found. Either the component that raises this event is not installed on your local computer or the installation is corrupted. You can install or repair the component on the local computer.
If the event originated on another computer, the display information had to be saved with the event.
The following information was included with the event:
Error getting configuration info from the database
the message resource is present but the message is not found in the string/message table

The VMware VirtualCenter Server service terminated with service-specific error The system cannot find the file specified..

The service specific error is 2.

I have search and these are common error issues, but the solutions do not seem to work for me.

My next step is probably to R&R the vCenter software, but I would rather not if someone has an idea here.  This needs to be part of by DR process.

Thanks.

Hi All,

It seems that VMWare and many of the surrounding programs are geared towards multi-million dollar datacenters, where I am sure they are doing wonderful things. However, for the last 5 years we have been focusing on bringing VMWare to small businesses. The problem that we are hitting now is backups…

Most of our installs are running vSphere Essentials 5 (some running on 4). Some time ago we got on the bandwagon of vRanger – it did everything we needed. On the fly backup of live running VMs, restoration of whole VM, or granular restores via mounting the old VM and extracting what's needed. I know it’s not as fancy as some of the other options with intelligent de-duplication and whatnot, but it worked great for our needs.

The problem is that Dell bought vRanger and a product that used to cost us $350 to license for 10 sockets spread out amongst as many machines as we wanted, now is billed per core and comes out to about $3,800 for the same end result. And Dell is pretty much killing the product – our sales reps there didn’t even know what vRanger was and I can only imagine what would happen if we needed to call someone for support… It took the better part of the week for them to even send us pricing!

We also looked at veem, but again it is just too pricey and complete overkill for us. We dont need a software that managers a million VMs spread out over thousands of servers on 4 continents. Our installs are 1-5 physical machines sharing a rack in a basement. vSphere+ seems to have a good built-in backup system, but it costs about $5k, which is also way out of our budget.

I thought the whole purpose of vmware was to make this kind of stuff cheap and easy – over the past few years it seems that with M$FT redefining their EULA’s and vmWare charging obscene amounts of money for what should be simple utilities, it is putting the technology out of reach of small business. At this point its pretty much sheaper to use something like BackupAssist on a physical box and call it good.

We are starting to look at either using OS-level backups (Windows backup, as sad as that may be), or just moving aware from virtualization altogether.

I am really hoping that someone could point me to a software that can do on-the-fly backups of the VMDK files that does not cost an arm, a leg and a nut.

Can you change the IP address of a VDP appliance?  I have gone in through the web GUI and changed it this way, however, upon boot it is still trying to access its old IP?  I know that in the documentation it states if you pick the wrong address you will have to redeploy, but... that just seems strange to me. 

Anyone?

Hello.. My VDP appliance is in a read-only state and will not boot into read-write.

I don't understand the command I think its asking for i.e. bash# mount -n -o remount,rw / doesn't work? Is the bash# asking for a certain drive or partition to mount?

I can log in but I do not understand the command its asking for to remount it as read-write? Please see attached for screen shots.. Thank you, Eric

Hi All,

I recently deployed a VDP appliance to replace VDR in our 5.1 enviroment, backing up through a FC EMC CX3-40f SATA array.

As soon as I setup the appliance (which was a nightmare due to the DNS error message!), CPU usage shot up to 2-3Ghz and stayed this way throughout the day. Bear in mind this was with no backup job configured, and there was little disk IO during this period.

I logged in to the appliance using SSH, and using top, found that the Java processes are taking up most of the CPU - along with intermittant bursts from "gsan".

I then setup and kicked off a backup of our enviroment after hours, and saw that the CPU usage shot up to 10GHz - I had to stop it to stop it affecting other VMs.

I understand that this product will require heavy resources due to the dedup, but is this really normal behaviour? It's maxing out an HP G7 blade at the moment!

I have tried combinations of 1 - 4 vCPU, upping the memory to 16Gb and updating Tools.

Anyone else seeing similar behaviour, or have any advice?

Hi to everyone

I need some help to regain access to my VDP appliance.

Environment:

vCenter server 5.1 listening to port 444

ESXi hosts 5.0 build 623860

VDP appliance 5.1.1

After first installation the backup job runs with no issues, but I cannot access file level restore web client with error "Login failed. HostSession is NULL"

I tried both with domain administrator account (used during appliance registration) and with SSO admin account (SYSTEM-DOMAIN\admin).

After a reboot I cannot access the VDP appliance at all from vsphere web client. If I try to login I am presented with the following pop-up:

"The VDP appliance is not responding. Please try your request again.

Would you like to be directed to the VDP configuration screen to troubleshoot the issue?"

Then I tried to re-register the appliance, but nothing changes.

Accessing the appliance through ssh, I sniffed some packets and noticed that I see traffic to the vcenter server on port 443 instead of 444 as expected (please note that before the reboot traffic was correctly sent to port 444):

root@dataprotection:~/#: tcpdump src or dst vcenter-ip and not port 22 and not port 8543

tcpdump: verbose output suppressed, use -v or -vv for full protocol decode

listening on eth0, link-type EN10MB (Ethernet), capture size 96 bytes

10:11:26.453654 IP dataprotection.33703 > vcenter.https: S 2574417830:2574417830(0) win 5840 <mss 1460,sackOK,timestamp 95863 0,nop,wscale 8>

10:11:26.453834 IP vcenter.https > dataprotection.33703: S 4065981307:4065981307(0) ack 2574417831 win 8192 <mss 1460,nop,wscale 8,sackOK,timestamp 20223503 95863>

10:11:26.453849 IP dataprotection.33703 > vcenter.https: . ack 1 win 23 <nop,nop,timestamp 95863 20223503>

10:11:26.457113 IP dataprotection.33703 > vcenter.https: P 1:152(151) ack 1 win 23 <nop,nop,timestamp 95864 20223503>

I see the following errors in /space/avamar/var/vdr/server_logs/vdr-server.log:

Then followed these instructions:

http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=2044826

but when I tried to restart mcs service I got the following error:

root@dataprotection:~/#: dpnctl start mcs

Identity added: /home/dpn/.ssh/dpnid (/home/dpn/.ssh/dpnid)

dpnctl: INFO: Starting MCS...

dpnctl: INFO: To monitor progress, run in another window: tail -f /tmp/dpnctl-mcs-start-output-21179

dpnctl: ERROR: error return from "[ -r /etc/profile ] && . /etc/profile ; /usr/local/avamar/bin/mcserver.sh --start" - exit status 1

And the content of file vcenterinfo.cfg was yet correct:

vcenter-hostname=**************************

vcenter-port=444

vcenter-username=MYDOMAIN\Administrator

vcenter-password={AES}ZDAM9DqvJolBBEdCE5ha5g==

vcenter-sso-hostname=*************************

vcenter-sso-port=7444

Many thanks

Hi

I had some backups fail last night and on 4 VMs I can see a snapshot that the VDP appliance made during the backup but was unable to remove automatically. (I assume)

Since these are some pretty critical servers I want to make sure that I can simply delete them using the snapshot manager without it impacting the running VMs in some way.

One of the reasons I want to be absolutely sure is that the view in the snapshot manager seems a bit odd. (See Attached images)

Shouldn't the snapshot be above the "You are here"? This it what it looks like on 3 of the VMs.

On the fourth it looks like this:

Any advice will be greatly appreciated.

Hi all,

I needed to wipe my vCenter server and start from scratch due to issues of naming conventions. Historic data loss was not going to be an issue.

I cleanly powered down vDP and removed vCenter server, SSO etc

A clean copy of SSO, vCenter and Update Manager installed. (same IP, different DNS name)

DNS was updated, and hosts re-attached to vCenter server.

vCenter was also configured with the same logon credentials for vDP

vDP was powered up and I navigated to the configure page.

When I try to re-attach to the new vCenter server I get the message:

"Your VDP Appliance does not appear to reside in the vCenter you have selected.  Please address this discrepancy before attempting to switch vCenters."

In vSphere Web Client I can see Data Protection, connect to it and view all previous backup jobs.

I don't intend to restore my old vCenter server, do I need to re-deploy the template into vCenter server?

vCenter Server v 5.1

vDP v 5.1.11.3

Hi folks,

is it possible to configure SNMP (Nagios) to track the status of my backup jobs ?

I already asked google, but I did not really find any solution.

BR,T

new vdp 5.5 appliance 1TB connected to a vcenter 5.5 appliance

configured a dozen or so backups that are working.

have 3 vm's that get

"An unexpected error occurred with the following error code: 10058"

the three vm's are windows 2008 servers.

running job manually or scheduled get the same error

google does not come up with any matches nor does this community have mention of the error code.

any ideas?

There are two ways of changing the IP address of a VDP appliance:

1- via vdp-configure web app

2- via VM console (the blue TUI inteface)

The correct one is the 1- option. If you will do it via 2- (like I did ) you'll end up with broken VDP. This method only changes settings on the network interface while it doesn't change avamar settings ... To fix it you'll have to manually edit IP address in the following files:

/etc/hosts

/etc/sysconfig/network/x-ifcfg-eth0.dpnnetutilbgaux_save

/etc/sysconfig/network/x-ifcfg-eth0.dpnnetutilbgaux_orig

/etc/x-hosts.dpnnetutilbgaux_orig

/space/avamar/var/dpnnetutil.xml

/space/avamar/var/probe.xml

After this reboot the appliance and it should be back to normal.

Anyway, this SHOULD be written in "VDP Administration Guide" and/or noticed in some KB ... or even better ... after VDP is initially configured, changing IP address via VDP console (the blue TUI inteface) should be disabled ... hopefully VMware will fix this someday.

Hi, we have a problem with backup via TSM.

What we have:

Windows Server 2008SP2

Vcenter 4.1

TSM – 6 version – Client and Server install on one Server with Vcenter

12 VM’s

Problem:

We have a problem only with one VM, and it’s don’t care goes itfirstor lastin the backup list. When Vcenter prepare snapshot which will be write via TSM, we have a few error messages.

From TSM client - dsmsched.log:

03/01/2014 23:07:15 Backup of Virtual Machine 'app'

03/01/2014 23:07:15 Mount virtual machine disk on backup proxy for VM 'app'

03/01/2014 23:07:15

Executing Operating System command or script:

   vcbMounter -h 192.169.***.*** -u backup -p **** -a ipaddr:app.ru -r "e:\mnt\fullvm\app\BACKUP_CURRENT" -t fullvm

03/01/2014 23:07:36 Finished command.  Return code is: 1

03/01/2014 23:07:36

03/01/2014 23:07:36

03/01/2014 23:07:36 Mount virtual machine disk on backup proxy for VM 'app'

03/01/2014 23:07:36

Executing Operating System command or script:

   vcbMounter -h 192.169.***.*** -u backup -p **** -a ipaddr:app.ru -r "e:\mnt\fullvm\app\BACKUP_CURRENT" -t fullvm -m nbd

03/01/2014 23:07:43 Finished command.  Return code is: 1

03/01/2014 23:07:43 ANS9265E Failure mounting Virtual Machine 'app' with vcbMounter command. RC=1

03/01/2014 23:07:43 ANS9264E Incremental backup of Virtual Machine 'app' failed with RC 1

And from VPXD logs:

[2014-03-01 23:07:35.907 04700 info 'App' opID=8e388aaa] [VpxLRO] -- BEGIN task-internal-6184 -- vm-42 -- vim.Task.GetInfo -- 5AF36BF8-BE74-400D-BCCB-DBA196F71B53(6FAF0F8D-9F23-4694-B77E-185634CB812C)

[2014-03-01 23:07:35.908 01696 info 'App' opID=46b9242b] [VpxLRO] -- FINISH task-49283 -- vm-42 -- vim.VirtualMachine.createSnapshot -- 5AF36BF8-BE74-400D-BCCB-DBA196F71B53(6FAF0F8D-9F23-4694-B77E-185634CB812C)

[2014-03-01 23:07:35.908 01696 info 'App' opID=46b9242b] [VpxLRO] -- ERROR task-49283 -- vm-42 -- vim.VirtualMachine.createSnapshot: vim.fault.Timedout:

I found only one KB, but it doesn’t work for our problem. 

http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=1004790

In IBM KB I can’t find anything helpful about ANS9265E and ANS9264E errors.

Please tell me if you need any log or system information.

Facing a problem using vDP 5.5.1 Standard.

I am sure I have taken a successful backup of my VMs and this backup is also showing me in the restore TAB.

But after restart the vDP Server, when I am selecting the "Restore" TAB, showing me "no restore points were found". Restore TAB is Blank. Why?

Also I can see the log of my successful backup,

01/12/2014 06:14:23: The backup job named "trv im kas im vcen backup on jan12-2014" was successfully Disabled.

01/12/2014 05:58:26: Backup job named "trv im kas im vcen backup on jan12-2014" completed.

01/12/2014 04:28:19: Backup job named "trv im kas im vcen backup on jan12-2014" started.

01/12/2014 04:27:37: A new backup job with name "trv im kas im vcen backup on jan12-2014" was created.

All the vDP 5.5.1 Services are Green in https://ip-address/vdp-configure.

vCenter Server Version is 5.5.0b.

Hello

i have 2 ESXi host with essential license, what I need now is to buy  some cheap entry level rackmount NAS solution for backup. I need two interfaces and at least 4TB Can u help me choosing best solution ?  Or do u have some good links that i could read to get some help ? Any advice would be greatly appreciated

Wojtek