Restart the VDR appliance - for some reason, it lost connection to the vCenter Server

Same problem for me,

After rebooting the vdr-appliance the backup works. But after a while (hours) a regular job or manual backup fails again.

Configuration:

VDR-appliance (1.0.2) and servers to backup are on a ESXi 4.0.0.181792

CIFS share for backups are on a Synology NAS in the same LAN

ESXi and VDR are connected to a VirtualCenter over a WAN (MPLS) connection

I have another VDR-appliance on a ESX 4 connected to the VirtualCenter (all in the same LAN) where I also do backups on a CIFs share. Here I don't have this problem.

any help appreciated

What are you using as a destination (VMDK or CIFS share).  Without the destination disk discovered and mounted, you cannot see the backup jobs and restore points. If VMDK, if you were to look under Hosts and Clusters and edit settings on the VM, does the VMDK still show up?  When you reboot, are there any errors about not being able to mount?

If CIFS share, you may have to reattach via the Configuration/Destinations/Add Network Share link.

Hi,

Yes, I understand that backup destinations must be available.  VDR had been running fine for a few weeks before this happened.

From all the problems I've been hearing throughout my VMUG and on these message boards, I would not say VDR is production ready.  Just last week, I changed the VDR VM to use 4GB of memory instead of 2GB and it crashed.

Otherwise, the product is great, it just has some more wrinkles to iron out.

I'm using the same version of VDR, and I was not able to backup my Windows Server 2008R2 VMs, with a fairly generic error:

Failed to create snapshot for VMNAME, error -1 ( unknown).

I was backing up to a CIFS share, so I added a disk to the VDR appliance that was a LUN on my FC attached SAN. Same issue. So I read I had to uninstall VMWare Tools and do a custom install and not use the VSS driver. So I did that for both my 2008R2 VMs, and now I get this error:

Failed to create snapshot for VMNAME, error -3941 ( create snapshot failed)

And yes, every once in a while I have to reboot my VDR. But I rebooted my VDR after removing the VSS drivers and I still get this error.

So yes, VDR still has issues...which is too bad - because when it works, it works well. My VAR sold us an Acronis Enterprise suite that was supposed to do backup (as well as P2V, etc.), but ironically, the latest version of Acronis doesn't work with vSphere (only took Acronis 3 days to figure that out), but vConverter and VDR could make me forget about Acronis issues, with just a little more reliability out of VDR. Especially since the new file level restore GUI debuted.

Keep up the good work, VMWare....you're almost there!

Hi there,

Sadly at the moment those errors are still happening in v1.0.2

up to this point, I no longer interested in this product anymore and now trialling various 3rd party backup tools which performs better dedupe backup and replication using vStorage API.

Kind Regards,

AWT

Great, downloading VDR v1.1 and trialling it now.

Cheers.

Kind Regards,

AWT