I have now reinstalled VM DR from scratch 5 times. The last time I did everything possible to keep the installation as clean and lean as possible. Everything then finally ran for 2 weeks without errors -- until the 2 nights ago. Then 4 of the 5 backups, all of which had started at 11 PM the previous night, were still running, none of them over 27% done. I tried stopping the backups, but when nothing changed after 30 minutes, I finally used the VM DR web page to shut it down. VM DR started up without errors and 2 integrity checks came up clean. Then last night the same thing happened again. And that is when I completed deleted VM DR, again.
If you are using VM DR, do not -- repeat -- do not under any circumstances trust it to keep working. I've been following the threads in this community and all of the problems I've seen are also being seen by others. The product is not ready for production, and, just as bad, there is an absolute paucity of documentation available for it. (I've read the admin guide twice, and even with ultra-careful reading, it only takes about 30 minutes to get through it.)
What was the final deal-breaker was that because the backups were not stopping, they were interferring with the VCB backups set up to run in the morning. Not working is one thing; interferring with the REAL backups rendered VM DR not only useless, but harmful.
Below are some notes on problems encountered with VM DR. (And, yes, I have opened cases with VMware. And, no, I have not come close to getting anything like resolutions. Although I did get one workaround that I had already figured out on my own, and another reply to essentially just ignore the issue for now.)
"FROM THE LOG - Note that all restores show up as "(damaged)":
8/8/2009 2:38:40 PM: Executing Integrity Check
8/8/2009 2:38:40 PM: To Backup Set /192.168.100.160/VMs/...
8/8/2009 7:48:35 PM: Integrity check failed for the restore point created on 8/3/2009 1:00:03 AM for BlancVM (same repeated 21 more times for other VMs)"
"8/4/09: ALL VM DR jobs failed with error "Trouble writing to destination volume, error -1115 (disk full)". Restarted VM DR appliance, and then ran Server1VM backup manually, which succeeded."
"7/31/09: ALL VM DR jobs failed with error "Failed to create snapshot for , error -3902". Able to run backups by choosing "Backup now"."
LOG: 8/25/2009 11:02:54 PM: Performing incremental back up of disk "[datastore2] Server1VMServer1VM-flat.vmdk" using "Network" |
LOG: 8/25/2009 11:22:30 PM: Trouble writing to destination volume, error -1115 ( disk full) |
LOG: 8/25/2009 11:53:14 PM: Starting VMware Data Recovery, version 1.0.1.362 |
8/26/09 7:15 AM: VM DR showing duplicates again. Rebooted appliance. |
8/27/09: Still running at 7 AM, 22% done. Tried to stop manually. | |
8/27/09: Still running at 7 AM, 28% done. Tried to stop manually. | |
8/27/09: Still running at 7 AM, 7% done. Tried to stop manually. | |
8/27/09: Still running at 7 AM, 27% done. Tried to stop manually. | |
MANUAL RESTART OF VM DR after backups would not complete or stop | |