I want to like vDR, I really do. It integrates nicely with vCenter, provides a relatively slick interface, and generally does what it says on the tin, but... there are a few things that are driving me mad, and I need to know if there's anything I can do about them.
Firstly, some VM's just will not back up. There's nothing special about them, they all have the latest VMware tools installed and running ok. This is affecting Windows and Linux VM's. It doesn't matter what I do, they just fail, every time, usually with the 'cannot quiesce virtual machine' errors. I've cloned the disks, re-installed tools, changed backup schedules, tried various manual options, but no, they will not backup. These VM's have just had to be excluded from the backup schedule, I've no other choice. It's now affecting 9 of the 55 VM's we run. I've now got a new problem with a Windows 2008 R2 VM. It's backed up fine for months, but in the last week it's decided it doesn't want to back up anymore, and the error report is that the task timed out without finishing. It's done this for the last week now. What the?
Next, the Integrity Check! This runs when it damn well feels like it, and on my system with a 500GB (~400Gb used) backup volume, can take upwards of 10 hours to run. My two backup schedules are configured to run at 7pm and 10pm, so guess what, if it doesn't finish, because it has a lock on the backup repository, more often than not the 7pm backup will fail, and even sometimes some of the VM's in the 10pm schedule as well. Why does the integrity check take so long to run? Why can't we schedule it to run over the weekend? I know it has to run at least once a week, but let's have some control over it.
Lastly, imagine you have a VM with a 40GB system vDisk. This VM also has a >1TB data vDisk. These vmdk files are located on different datastores. It's what we all do, and for normal operations, works well. I now want to use vDR to just backup the system vDisk, but when I try, it fails every time with the good old 'cannot quiesce virtual machine' error. Apparently even if you just want to backup the single system disk, vDR has to also quiesce the whole VM, including the 1TB data disk, and if there's not enough resource for this, it won't do it. VMware's solution is to re-configure the VM so the .vmx file is in on the same datastore as the 1TB vDisk, even though you're not backing this up!
So, even running the latest 1.2.1.x version, I'm still having the same old problems. Give it a few months, and I'll probably find none of the VM's we operate will want to backup anymore!
