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dustinn3
Contributor
Contributor

VDR 1.2 Reliability

Just curious if VDR 1.2 is improved over previous versions. I tried using all the previous versions and couldn't get any of them to work consistently. They would backup for a few days, then suddenly they would start failing and eventually all my backups would get corrupted. Consistency checks would take days. Supports only resolution was to reboot the VDR appliance and delete the restore points. I've been burned so far, so I'm hesitant to try it again until it's a bit more mature.

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athlon_crazy
Virtuoso
Virtuoso

So far so good for us. Performance wise it's acceptable, no corrupted issue except for unclean snapshot when got power failure and integrity check so far better than previous release.

http://www.no-x.org
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aarondovetail
Contributor
Contributor

I've had issues with mine, I'd let it run for a few days then it gets completely hosed up. The appliance would also crash over and over and never complete a re-index.

Today I just blew everything away, the appliance and the backup destinations I was using. I re-deployed a new appliance and created 2 new backup destinations (windows shares) and I'm going to start from scratch to see if it helps.

It does seem to be very finicky and slow in general? I was backup up 4 VMs at once a little while ago and I never saw the network traffic go above 24MB/sec, and more like averaged around 12-15MB/sec.

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aarondovetail
Contributor
Contributor

On this new appliance I also reduced the number of backup tasks at once time to 4, from 8. 8 seems like a pretty high number to be happening at once. I gave the appliance 4 vCPUs instead of 2 and 3GB of memory also. With 4 backup tasks running at once its easily maxing out the 4 vCPUs and memory, so maybe having 8 running at once was overloading it and causing it to get screwed up? no idea.

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ChrisDearden
Expert
Expert

Don't forget you can install multiple VDR appliances with 1.2 so you dont have to load up a single appliance. I dont use it for day to day backups , but its a great additional layer for some ad-hoc backups as an alternative to a long running snapshot. Lack of reporting is a dissapointment though.

@chrisdearden

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John4567
Contributor
Contributor

I'm so angry at VDR 1.2 that I registered here so I could rant ....

It is... in a word... shit.

Stupid thing does nothing but fail to backup VM's, eat resources, crash and generally make a mess of things. Deleted it last night, this damn thing should be in beta testing or something.

/end rant.

-John

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aarondovetail
Contributor
Contributor

Well it already blew up -- New appliance, new server and backup points and I'm only backing up like 10 VMs..

This product is like alpha stage or something

10/5/2010 5:01:46 PM: Integrity check failed for the restore point created on 10/4/2010 10:03:26 PM for Mahogany

10/5/2010 5:01:46 PM: Integrity check failed for the restore point created on 10/4/2010 3:30:04 PM for DB7

10/5/2010 5:01:46 PM: Integrity check failed for the restore point created on 10/4/2010 7:00:13 PM for DB10

10/5/2010 5:01:46 PM: Integrity check failed for the restore point created on 10/4/2010 4:04:39 PM for Mahogany

10/5/2010 5:01:46 PM: Integrity check failed for the restore point created on 10/4/2010 7:00:11 PM for DB7

10/5/2010 5:01:46 PM: Integrity check failed for the restore point created on 10/4/2010 7:00:08 PM for DB6

10/5/2010 5:01:47 PM: Integrity check failed for the restore point created on 10/4/2010 4:45:46 PM for DB10

10/5/2010 5:01:47 PM: Backup Set "/db13.dovetaildmz.local/vmbackup2/" will be locked until the restore point with errors are deleted and integrity check succeeds.

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nathanw
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

I have deployed 3 appliances for a few weeks now, so far so good.

Very distressing however to hear of these issues will keep an eye on it

Nathan VCP
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SylvainLanglade
Contributor
Contributor

I tend to agree with other users complaining about strange behaviors. VDR 1.2 is really more stable and usable than previous versions, but some things tend to really be awkward :

  • integrity checks that hang without any possibility to cancel, requiring a VDR reboot

  • cryptic warnings and error, without any details

  • older restore points suddenly declared as damaged

The last point is really frightening : how doing a backup can possibly do some damage to older ones that were declared perfectly clean the day before ? what does that tell about deduplicate store stability ?..

So, all in all, it really could be a great product for those of us with small installations and small needs. Juste need a bit of polish,so I could have more confidence in using it.

Cheers.

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aarondovetail
Contributor
Contributor

Yeah having corrupted backups isn't a good thing, mine is running fine for the moment (I had to delete a number of backups and start fresh on a few VMs). If it messes up again then I'm going back to the old way.

I have a small installation with 3 hosts and 25 VMs, if it can't keep up with this then certainly no bigger company could use this product?

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RParker
Immortal
Immortal

I've been burned so far, so I'm hesitant to try it again until it's a bit more mature.

Better.. .... umm.. ok yes. For SOME things. VDR 1.0 was like a negative response, like -10. VDR 1.1 was even worse, they fixed some things, but other things were broken. So now its -20.

VDR 1.2 is a BIT better, they fixed the things that SHOULD have worked in the first place, so as far as I am concerned we are at ZERO, which means they are STILL well below other products.

Backup is too important to be guessing if they are going to work or not, or be there when you need them.. and not run out of space. Still lacking many many features that we need like..oh.. REPORTING and NOTIFICATION (VM Ware what were they thinking?!?!?!?).

So it's FINALLY moving in the right direction, but before you decide is satisfactory, I would investigate Veeam, vizioncore, and esXpress BEFORE I give VDR another try. That's my 2 cents.

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RParker
Immortal
Immortal

Don't forget you can install multiple VDR appliances with 1.2 so you dont have to load up a single appliance.

Yes, that's just terrific, so instead of baby sitting and reinstalling 1 VDR now you have to baby sit and reinstall multiples...not a good solution. You should not have to keep installing and reinstall for it to work, that's just not a good solution at all.

Lack of reporting is a dissapointment though.

Yes, and That should have been a MINIMUM requirement for backups. I mean come on.. some products are EXPECTED to be there with software. Accounting needs ledger and balance sheets. Database needs cache and memory tweaking... backup NEEDS reporting.. It's almost comical (if it weren't so sad) this product was designed by first year programmers as their first project. It's totally ridiculous how bad this product was designed, and to think they PAID for this privilege.. amazing.

It's like if VDR was a car, it would be missing the speedometer and warning lights, the transmission would have 1 gear (3rd, no second or first) and only 1 person allowed to sit in the back. Reverse was added as an AFTER thought (VDR 1.1) and the consumer had to TELL them this... When the car stops, you need to restart it by getting out, removing the battery cable, reconnecting, and trying again. The tires wouldn't be standard bolts, and you would have to find a tool (that's not out yet) to change the tires. It's a REALLY crazy design.

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RParker
Immortal
Immortal

Deleted it last night, this damn thing should be in beta testing or something.

We agree, not even beta, it's like PRE-Alpha.

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jasoncllsystems
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Free one no good. Good one no free.






Regards,

jlchannel

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aarondovetail
Contributor
Contributor

Ok I'm convinced now, this product sucks. I've tried new appliances, new servers for backup destinations, changing the schedules and once again it's hosed up. It's been running fine for about 4 days and I checked this morning and both of my backup destinations are totally hosed with integrity errors on multiple backup points. Bye bye VDR

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cdickerson
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

I too am sick and tired of this product. I've deployed it for multiple customers and all have the same problem. It runs for a couple of days, crashes, keeps vmdk's assigned to it, keeps snapshots running and a whole mess ensues. VMware support is useless, I too can't believe they offer such a sub-par product. Granted it's free, guess you get what you pay for. Paid products aren't much better though in my experience. Any technology that uses VMware snapshots is destined to fail!

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coldtech
Contributor
Contributor

My problem is it's not "FREE", I specifically factored it in as a solution when we purchased essentials plus.

It's included in the feature list.

Now I will have to pay more for a (working) backup solution then I did for the entire vSphere product.

What frightens me is if VDR was written with VMwares vStorage API and it's a pile of crap, are 3d party solutions going to be any better?

I just installed Veeam and it seems to be working well so far.

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dustinn3
Contributor
Contributor

I totally agree as well. I purchased vmware vsphere 4.0 advanced with VDR so it was not free, it was an included feature. That's like saying I bought my truck with the LT package so it has power seats, but I shouldn't expect them to work because they were free. I shouldn't have to spend thousands of dollars more because the product I bought doesn't work and over a year later they still can't make it work.

I'm currently testing veeam as well and so far it's worked fairly well. However I did have it fail to remove a snapshot because it didn't remove the disk from the veeam server. Hopefully it's not a recurring problem.

If I get my budget approved I'm just going to buy another netapp and replicate offsite. It's expensive, but at least it works.

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John4567
Contributor
Contributor

Our solutions provider here in Melbourne has been struggling with this issue for nearly two whole weeks... VMDR was a CRITICAL factor in deciding to go with VMWare and Essentials Plus, if I had known that it was as broken as it currently is I would have delayed our move to VMWARE or we may have decided to use alternative virtualisation technologies.

VMWare's silence on this issue is deafening, it is clear to me that VMDR is hopelessly broken, every morning our solutions provider sets up another job to run, every morning I am confronted with dozens and dozens of VMware alerts from VCenter about CPU usage, host connectivity failures, and a barrage of other issues.

What's worse, after doing a test backup/restore with VMDR at the start of implementation (which seemed to go well) we migrated our EXCHANGE SERVER over to VMWARE, that's right folks... our production Exchange box with the e-mail, shared calender, appointments, meetings and notes for my entire organisation is sitting inside an environment who's backup technology is hopeless flawed.

Thank god for ShadowProtect is all I can say.

I've looked at 3rd party products such as Symantec Backup Exec R2... lets just say the pricing for that product alone was almost (actually more than) my entire VSphere Essentials Plus pakage and then some, even with a 50% discount that the solution provider managed to wrangle out of them (as they know this project is rapidly turning into one of 'those' projects) i'm looking at a 20%+ cost blow-out on this project.

Put it this way... if I could wind the clock back about month to just the moment when I signed up for this project, i'd take it all back and leave myself running on bare metal.

I am deeply dissapointed in VMWARE both as a product and technology platform and will definately be warning fellow I.T Managers in my industry to carefully consider the 'full' cost of VMWARE when evaluating it and to not consider access to VMDR backup system when making their decisions, they need to price in a 3rd party backup system into the costings. If we had known this a few weeks ago and priced in the backup solution, we would not have gone with VMWARE.

VMDR is not ready for mainstream, it's a great idea, but it's not ready yet.

The real shame of this whole thing, what really sticks on my claw about this... VMWARE itself is bloody brilliant, the ability to move VM's between hosts, access shared storage, shared resources, the metrics you can get, the ease with which you can deploy new infrastructure.. fantastic, what a terrible shame that it's all let down by such a lousy backup tool.

VMware, please pull VMDR back to your Developers and let them get this product mature before more people factor it into their purchasing decisions, it's only going to cause you guys more grief and undo an awful lot of good work.

I can't fault our solution provider, they've put in a lot of hours on this and they're feeling a bit under the pump too, it's not good for everyone involved.

-John

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cdickerson
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

I'm currently testing veeam as well and so far it's worked fairly well. However I did have it fail to remove a snapshot because it didn't remove the disk from the veeam server. Hopefully it's not a recurring problem.

It is... I have numerous customers using Veeam Backup and Replication and this happens a lot. the issue with Veeam is that it will keep creating snapshots even after the first backup fails. Had a VM with 20 snapshots once, all created by Veeam. Their support is useless as well. All they want to do is refer me to VMware articles on how to consolidate snapshots, not how their product has failed or what can be done to prevent it, or heck, fix their product! Don't even get me started on how rude their guys were at VMWorld.

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