Just wanted to post our findings with what we have successfully tested in our backup environment while preparing to migrate to vSphere 5.
First off, one of the frustrating issues in a large datacenter is when you need to upgrade a specific product in order to acquire new features or just to stay at supported levels, it becomes such a PITA to make sure everything works together. So for all the backup vendors that didn't have support for vcenter 5 right at the launch...or even now...shame on you.
As of today, VMware says that you need vddk 5.0 in order to back up VMs on an esxi 5 farm. CA just announced that Arcserve 16 SP1 now supports vddk 5.0. They say they are working on a patch for those of us at Arcserve 15 SP1 but make no promises when it will be available. So until then, we are stuck using Arcserve 15 SP1 with vddk 1.2.1...or need to upgrade our backup environment (more dependencies to check).
The summation of our testing: You need VDDK 5.0 in order to back up VMs on VMFS 5.0. VDDK 1.2.1 works on ESXi 5 with VMFS3.x
Here are the tests we ran.
| vCenter | Host | VMFS | Backup | Restore |
|---|
| vSphere 5.0 | ESXi 5.0 | VMFS 5.0 | FAIL | FAIL |
| vSphere 5.0 | ESXi 5.0 | VMFS 3.x | Success | Success* |
| vSphere 5.0 | ESXi 4.1 | VMFS 3.x | Success | Success |
| vSphere 5.0 | ESX 4.1 | VMFS 3.x | Success | Success |
| vSphere 5.0 | ESX 4.0 | VMFS 3.x | Success | Success |
So, the good news is that...at least in our environment... we can continue our upgrade to vCenter 5.0 and upgrade our hosts to ESXi 5. However, we will have to wait to implement VMFS5 but we can wait to do that either until we get an Arcserve 15 SP1 patch or get our backup environment up to Arcserve 16 SP1.
* The restore worked and the VM was just fine...however in order to restore the VM to the ESXi 5 cluster, we had to remove a host from vCenter, disassociate it, and then the restore worked.
