Hi,
This is the question...
To be honest I have had just about enough of VDR.
After running fine for several months, I am now repeatedly getting random integrity failures which of course take an age to sort (If possible - the majority of times it is ends up being the case that you have to scrap the whole store and start again - which of course means you lose all the possibly fine historical backups too, because VMware has no supported way of getting any backups out).
I would not mind too much if VMware said "Look here is this software we have made, its free and has its limitations/issues but you can use it if you want."
However what VMware do is actually push this as a paid for production ready piece of software for the more advanced levels of the vSphere range. This is completely unacceptable. As an end user purchasing software, if I see a feature that is explained like VDR is on VMware's website, I expect it to work.
Whenever I log a support call for VDR, even the VMware engineers I speak to say it is not ready for production and they see lots and lots of cases of store corruption, and basically everytime despite numerous time consuming attempts to repair, as mentioned earlier the basic resolving scenario is just wipe away and start again. This makes it absolutely useless for storing anything other than the last nights backup, because you can never be sure that a backup which completed fine 3 months ago (And has been integrity checked several times since then), may all of a sudden be magically corrupted, forcing a wipe of the entire store...
I hear 2.1 is due soon, and thats going to be it for VDR, as VMware/EMC are working on something else... anyone got any ideas?
