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Momaydopod
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Need to consolidate disk every day

Deal Member

I have question for VDP

1. when VDP run backup is completed the 2 guest(DNS,WSUS) have symbol question on name ?  I must do consolidate everyday if i don't do consolidate backup is failed .

2.Why VDP some time is backup failed?

vSphere Data Protection
Summary Report for vSphere Data Protection 5.8

Items Needing Attention


 

Backup Job: High-Priority: Last Backup Job:

Failed

Unprotected Virtual Machines:

3

DNS:

Last backup failed

WSUS:

Last backup failed

vdp vSphere Data Protection 5.8 - (192.168.0.23)


 

Report Date::

December 16, 2014 - 08:00

Last Report Date:

December 15, 2014 - 08:00

Appliance Type:

VDP

Integrity Check Status:

Normal

Successful Backups (Last 72 hours):

11

Failed Backups (Last 72 hours):

2

Successful Replication Backups (Last 72 hours):

0

Failed Replication Backups (Last 72 hours):

0

Backup Jobs Summary


 

Backup Job: High-Priority

Backup Storage:

vSphere Data Protection 5.8 Appliance

Last Start Time:

December 16, 2014 - 00:00

Next Run Time:

December 17, 2014 - 00:00

Last Backup Job:

Failed

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5 Replies
Paul11
Hot Shot
Hot Shot

Do you have an umlaut or a special character in your VM name? You must also look at the name of the disk-file, if a special character is masked or not.

If it is masked, it looks like this: +w7w-. If it is not masked you see the special character in the name of your vmdk file and since VDP V5.8 this is a problem.

Previous versions of VDP havn't had a problem with this. If this is the case you can solve it by renaming the VM and doing a Storage Vmotion to another location.

If you have set the parameter config.provisioning.relocate.enableRename to true, the disk-file will get the new name and the backup should work than.

This has solved the problem in my environment for 2 VMs. But I have also a few other VMs, where an manual consolitation is necessary, but not on a daily basis.

So there a more reasons for this problem, but I only have a solution for the umlaut or special character reason.

Paul

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Momaydopod
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

This is a VMDK of Guest have on iSCSI NAS

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arjanhs
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

I'm running the following two PowerShell command's within a scheduled task for this. It will check is any consolidation is needed, and when needed the disk is consolidated.

Get-VM | Where-Object {$_.Extensiondata.Runtime.ConsolidationNeeded}

Get-VM | Where-Object {$_.Extensiondata.Runtime.ConsolidationNeeded} | ForEach-Object { $_.ExtensionData.ConsolidateVMDisks()}

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LeslieBNS9
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

If you consolidate the disks does the VDP backup actually complete and indicate so in the report? Usually we have disk consolidation problems because the backup job someone had a problem (even if it did actually backup the VMs).

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anthonymaw
Contributor
Contributor

Not sure if this is a permanent solution but I have found that for those VMs that report "Disk consolidation needed" after VDP appliance backup, if you check the VDP appliance hardware configuration you may see that there are extra VM's disk files attached to the appliance.

It looks like the VDP backup appliance takes a snapshot, attaches the target VM disk to itself temporarily and then makes the backup.

After the backup it is supposed to release/dismount the VM disk and consolidate the snapshot (since it was backing up a running VM), but sometimes it fails to do so.

The VM disk remains locked in a snapshot mode.

Attempting to do a manual snapshot consolidation fails because the VDP appliance has an open file handle of the VMDK.

When I look at my own VDP backup appliance in vCenter, I have seen sometimes up to two extra VM Hard disks mounted.

The solution is easy: Just click the Remove button to dismount them.

I can then successfully do a snapshot consolidation procedure to clear the warning message.

The problem seems to be intermittent for me but when it happens the above described procedure to release the disk solves the problem.

in the attached screenshot I have seen Hard disk 8 and Hard disk 9 for some of the backup target VMs.

Hope this helps.

Anthony Maw, Vancouver, CanadaCapture.JPG

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