VMware Cloud Community
maleitch
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Stuck on 5.0 because I don't want VDP...5.5 version any better?

Running a 5.0 environment with VDR 2.0.1 and while it is not great, for the most part it works.  After reading so many horror stories and limitations with VDP I have been avoiding 5.1 updates but with 5.5 out I do not want to get too far behind.

I would prefer not to have to justify a 3rd party application so I am willing to give VDP a try, but would like to hear from the community as to their opinion on the state of the product.  If anyone knows of a way to get VDR working with 5.5 I would love to hear it even though I know it is not officially supported.

Thanks for everyone's time.

5 Replies
markokobal
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Hi,

We had serious issues with VDR on vSphere 5.1 and were forced to move to VDP (well, of course we could aslo use some other $$$ solution instead Smiley Wink ). Don't use VDR on 5.0+ - it is unsupported, will likely cause you problems (see VDR (daterecovery process) suddenly started repeatedly crashing ) and when you'll call VMware Support they will say "can't help you, it's not supported". And yes - it good to keep up with vSphere ... there are many addded-value features on versions 5.0+

Currently we'are somehow happy with VDP (see A bit of encouraging words for the VMware Data Protection appliance ) and we have just upgraded to VDP 5.5. Neither VDR nor VDP are perfect. VDR has really lots of usable features (can be well monitored, has CLI file-level restore, supports ext4 FLR, etc.), but on the other hands has issues with Integrity check constantly failing, etc.. VDP is fast, has great de-dupe, but really lacks some essential features (as I noted in my post about our VDP experience) ... besides the lack of features, in VDP 5.5 there is still one critical issue (at least for us), described here: VDP Backup jobs not considering new VM joined to ressources pools

Said that:

if (you have $$$) {

go with Veeam

} else if (can't live with lack of VDP features and known bugs) {

stay on VDR

} else {

take a deep breath, prepare well and migrate to VDP ... it actually works (somehow)

}

Good luck!

-- Kind regards, Marko. VCP5
vmrulz
Hot Shot
Hot Shot

5.51 still sucks. In fact I think 5.1 was better. I've been attempting to deploy in a split datastore scenario to NFS storage. By split I mean the VM living on one datastore and the backup disks on another datastore. I can deploy "normal" vm's in this manner on the same storage... Why not VDP? Mind you I'm using thin disks (just like I did with 5.1) because it is dev.. and well NFS is thin by default.

The lack of useable logging messages and poor inaccurate reporting just add to the problems with this product. Knowing what I know about Avamar and its inherent complexity, I plead with vmware to dump it ASAP and buy VEEAM (the company). Divorce yourselves from using EMC products ASAP... at least their software products.

vMariaL
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

markokobal wrote:

if (you have $$$) {

go with Veeam

} else if (can't live with lack of VDP features and known bugs) {

stay on VDR

} else {

take a deep breath, prepare well and migrate to VDP ... it actually works (somehow)

}

Hi markokobal, vmrulz, thank you for mentioning Veeam!

maleitch, from what you've described, it sounds like Veeam Backup & Replication would be a good fit. Veeam is built specifically for virtualization, it supports VMware vSphere 5.1 and older versions (support for VMware vSphere 5.5 will be delivered in a timely manner). Please let me know if any questions will appear and good luck in your search!

----

Veeam Community Manager

---- Veeam Community Manager
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GSparks
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

If you would like to upgrade your VDR to VDP 5.5, you have to do it in a couple of steps.

The VDP 5.5 appliance does not include the VDR to VDP migration tool.  So, you would need to deploy a VDP 5.1.10 appliance, use the VDR to VDP migration tool.

Then upgrade the VDP appliance from 5.1.10 to 5.5.

-Greg Sparks
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MaartenD
Contributor
Contributor

Well, a  few things to mention about VDP...

Upgrading from 5.1 to 5.5 went fine using an ISO file but take because you will lose your backup jobs. (not the history!)

You are still able to restore from previous backups but you need to reestablish the jobs to get it running again.

The same happens when you move the VDP installation from one vCenter to another (this makes sense because it is registered in vCenter)

Anyway I upgraded my deployments from 5.1 to 5.5 and succeeded in this with one of my three VDP installations .

The other two installations seemed to be unrecoverable since I moved them from one vCenter installation to another.

Something went wrong and I wasn't be able to restore them using a Rollback.

For some reason I wasn't be able to register it at the new vCenter installation.

Upgrading wasn't possible since performing a roll back didn't work-out.

So I ended up with a situation where I had to deploy VDP from scratch.

I decided to use version 5.5. This went pretty well besides that it took some time before I discovered that I had to perform the deployment through the web interface.

Before this all kind of strange DNS related issues passed by.

So don't use the vSphere client to deploy VDP 5.5!!

After a successful deployment I was able to start a few backup jobs by hand.

Unfortunately the rest of the jobs which started automatically didn't succeed.

I found the appliance the next morning crashed.

I got the message "The VDP Appliance has experienced an unsystematic shutdown and will likely require a checkpoint rollback to restore data protection functionality.  Initiate this process from the Rollback tab."

It seemed that the core services was crashed.

I performed a Rollback again and had to configure all backup jobs again.

After this I went through the same procedure of performing some jobs by hand and leaving the rest to the automation.

Un fortunately it crashed again with the same error.

I'm not sure now what to do.

I might log a call at VMware now since I can't explain this behavior.

So in my opinion I haven't found a good reason to advise this product.

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