Hi All,
It’s been one of those weeks.... so forgive me if seem a little tired and cross.
We upgraded to vSphere a little over 2 weeks ago, and the upgrade went very well, except in one area. Backups.
Symantec GRT in Backup Exec in 2010 does not work with vSphere. When I say doesn't work, it backs up, but it will not restore individual files.
This is the support document that describes the problem.[http://seer.entsupport.symantec.com/docs/351420.htm|http://seer.entsupport.symantec.com/docs/351420.htm]
If you read the support document carefully you will see that;
A restore of the full vm is possible. (Lucky otherwise we'd really be nuked)
It will work if you backup directly from an ESX host
Symantec are aware of the issue but have no concrete plans to fix it. (Ok)
We should all talk to a Symantec salesperson if we want to get it fixed. (Awesome)
But
They offer 2 work arounds
1) Don’t use it... not technically a work around.
2) Back up directly to each of your ESX hosts. Now I haven’t tested what issues that may create for backup and restore jobs, if for example I don’t want to back up or restore an entire host, but I'm guessing if you motion anything and don’t put it back where it's "supposed" to be you're going to have issues.
I have many things I want to say now, a tirade about releasing incomplete products, another tirade about promoting heavily features that don't work, a smaller tirade about the IT industry and its current risk of becoming the used car salesmen of the 21st century... but I'll keep that for another forum and another day.
I will however say this, in general the product does what I'd hoped it would do, backups straight to tape without wasting terabytes of valuable storage for staging, a single process to back up everything, being able to back up an Exchange server’s virtual machine alone and restore individual mail items, fantastic. Except that it doesnt work with vSphere.
The fact that Symantec even need to question whether this is a significant business issue means that they are completely out of touch with the requirements of VMware vSphere users, or dodging the fact that they have released an incomplete product, this issue could not have been missed in testing!!! Only in our industry can you release a product that you say does something, and then nothing happens to you when it doesn't, it makes me very sad, angry, frustrated, annoyed etc
Now I know you test everything, but in case you forgot, or haven't yet tried to restore an individual file, I write this hopefully to save you from thinking your backups are fine, they are not.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to do research on re-skilling for another industry 