NetVault Plug-in for VMware 11.4 - Release Notes

Corrected an issue that performed file-level backups through Plug‑in for VMware instead of using the NetVault Backup Plug-in for FileSystem. To correct this issue, you must upgrade your environment to use NetVault Backup 11.4 or later.

DNFSP-944 (32798)

Corrected an issue that prevented an image-level restore to a local file system from Incremental or Differential Backups.

DNVMWARE-1051 (22043)

Corrected an issue that prevented file-level restores from succeeding when a significant number of files are involved.

DNVMWARE-1313 (26465)

Corrected issues that caused the plug-in to stop working during file-level restores.

DNVMWARE-1407, DNVMWARE-1559, DNVMWARE-1591 (28504, 30540, 30998)

Corrected an issue that rendered unchanged, restored files in Logical Volume Manager (LVM) volumes empty when they were restored from an Incremental Backup.

DNVMWARE-1565 (30647)

Confirmed that the following correction made in version 11.1 still functions correctly in 11.4. Corrected an issue that caused file-level indexing to fail when trying to locate an attribute record.

DNVMWARE-1568 (30663)

Corrected an issue that prevented successful backups of a virtual machine that contains a GUID partition table (GPT) disk partition whose globally unique identifier (GUID) = 00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000.

DNVMWARE-1657 (31970)

Corrected an issue that prevented the backing up of a virtual machine after it had been restored to the same vCenter Server.

DNVMWARE-1694 (32429)

Corrected an issue that permitted completion of backups with warnings instead of failing with an indication that the index could not be written.

DNVMWARE-1715 (32827)

When restoring data to an alternate datastore, the plug-in does not verify whether the datastore is available. Verify that the datastore is valid and has sufficient disk space to accommodate the virtual machine.

DNVMWARE-18 (1714)

Raw Device Mapping (RDM) disks in virtual compatibility mode are restored to flat “.vmdk” files and not to the original RDM. The alternative is to omit these disks during a restore.

DNVMWARE-332 (2371)

If you select the Auto setting as the primary transport mode, during the backup of a virtual machine that has disks on SAN storage and storage accessible only through the network, the NetVault Backup logs may report the transport mode incorrectly as “san.” This issue occurs only when the disk is opened in a network-based mode — network block device (NBD) or NBDSSL (encrypted).

DNVMWARE-347 (2394)

The configuration setting [Custom:MountOperationTimeoutSecs], which is stored in the vmware.cfg file, determines how long the plug-in process waits for the mount daemon to respond to a request. The default value is set to 600 seconds during a fresh install and 300 seconds during an upgrade. If the mount daemon is unable to complete a request within the specified interval, the virtual machine is left in a mounted state.

If you have many backups running simultaneously or your server is running under heavy load, modify the value for the [Custom:MountOperationTimeoutSecs] setting to avoid this issue.

DNVMWARE-505 (3131)

Virtual Disk Development Kit (VDDK) does not support non-UTF8 locales. On Linux-based clients that use non-UTF8 locales, the plug-in reports the error “Child Process died unexpectedly” and exits abnormally.

DNVMWARE-584 (3340)

When you use the NetVault Backup Plug-in for Consolidation, the image-level backups of virtual machines are displayed on the Create Selection Set page, but you cannot consolidate these savesets.

NVBU-3785

(6598, NVG-5474)

When you browse a localized virtual machine from an X11 or Motif GUI, the encoding of the name can cause the display to be scrambled or to not display at all.

DNVMWARE-664

(13679, VMW-157)

You cannot back up virtual machine templates using the Plug‑in for VMware.

Workaround: Convert the template to a virtual machine.

DNVMWARE-713

(13728, VMW-202)

To avoid file fragmentation, the Plug‑in for VMware preallocates disk space before restoring files to disk. On Linux-based systems, files that are larger than 50 MB in size are not pre‑allocated full disk space. Such files are handled similar to sparse files and allocated disk space as needed during restore. If the disk does not have sufficient space to fully restore files that are larger than 50 MB in size, the job fails when the disk runs out of space.

DNVMWARE-961 (21755)

The file-level indexing process does not generate indexes for symlinks.

DNVMWARE-977 (21793)

The file-level indexing process does not treat hard links in any special way and generates index entries for them as if they are separate entities. When you restore a saveset that includes a hard link, the plug-in stops responding.

DNVMWARE-978 (21794)

When a standalone VMware ESXi Server is added to the plug-in, a backup selection at a Resource Pool level does not back up any virtual machines in the resource pool.

DNVMWARE-1043 (22030)

Plug‑in for VMware 2.6 issues:

NVBU-8838 (24156)

When using the NBD transport mode with VMware vSphere 5.1, a large Read Block Size may prevent multiple backup processes from running at the same time.

Workaround: Use SAN or SCSI HotAdd transport modes or decrease Read Block Size.

DNVMWARE-1430 (28815)

When restoring NTFS sparse files, if the actual allocated size of a data run is smaller than the total size of the data run, the restored file might be corrupted.

DNVMWARE-1456 (29043)

If the Diagnose Virtual Machine method is unable to return any result within the timeout interval (five minutes), the Web Service process displays the following message: “Error: The remote machine: <Name of the NetVault Backup Server> is unavailable”

You can close this dialog box to continue the current operation. In the background, the Diagnose Virtual Machine method runs the cleanup process to remove any snapshot that it has created.

DNVMWARE-1528 (29795)

The plug-in is unable to restore a standalone VMware ESXi Server 6.5 virtual machine to VMware vCenter 6.0 or 6.5.

DNVMWARE-1698 (32475)

The plug-in is unable to restore a virtual machine protected by VMware vSphere Fault Tolerance (vSphere FT) to an alternate VMware vCenter Server.

DNVMWARE-1691 (32398)

Installing an update of the plug-in puts the VMware Vstor2 MntApi driver into an inconsistent state.

Workarounds:

If you are using a Windows-based proxy server, restart the server after you remove a VDDK. If you try to install or remove the VMware Vstor2 MntApi driver without restarting the server, you might encounter an error. For more information, see http://pubs.vmware.com/Release_Notes/en/developer/vddk/65/vsphere-vddk-65-release-notes.html.

Before installing the latest version of the plug-in, complete the following steps:

DNVMWARE-1697 (32473)

When backing up a powered on virtual machine through a VMware vCenter Server, the plug-in may fail to back up the “.nvram”, “.vmx”, and “.log” files. For more information, see http://kb.vmware.com/kb/1019286.

When a snapshot is created on a virtual machine that uses thin-provisioned disks, VMware vSphere (the client and the underlying disk library) identifies the disk as thick. For more information, see http://kb.vmware.com/kb/1020137.

At the time of enabling CBT for a virtual machine, no snapshots must exist on it. For more information, see http://kb.vmware.com/kb/1033816.

If an ESXi 5.x host is managed by a vCenter Server, the virtual machines should not be restored when connected directly to the ESXi host. This restriction is due to a feature introduced in vSphere 5. For more information, see http://www.vmware.com/support/developer/vddk/VDDK-500-ReleaseNotes.html#knownissues.

To prevent the migration of a virtual machine while its disks are being accessed for a backup or restore, the plug-in uses VDDK APIs to lock and unlock a virtual machine. This functionality is disabled by default. To enable it, see the user's guide for the plug-in. Currently, the locking functionality has the following known issues:

VDDK 5 issues:

On a Windows 2012 virtual machine, data corruption may occur during or after a network copy operation. For more information, see http://kb.vmware.com/kb/2058692.

If the size of a virtual drive is 2 TB or a multiple of 2 TB, the disk is always opened in NBD mode instead of SAN. This issue only affects virtual machines that use hardware version 10 (vmx-10).

Workaround: Increase or decrease the size of the virtual drive (for example, to 2.01 TB, 3.99 TB).

DNVMWARE-1373 (27742)

When a virtual machine is cloned outside the vCenter Server, it may have the same UUID as the original virtual machine. If this cloned virtual machine is selected for a backup, the plug-in may back up the original virtual machine instead of the clone. To correct this issue, you must change the UUID of the cloned virtual machine. For more information about changing the UUID of a virtual machine, see http://kb.vmware.com/kb/1002403.

DNVMWARE-1443 (28921)

To back up virtual machines that are protected by VMware vSphere Fault Tolerance (vSphere FT) with plug-in version 11.2 or later, your environment must use VMware ESXi 6.0 build number 4192238 or later. If you use an ESXi host with an unsupported build, vSphere FT protection might become disabled during the snapshot process. This issue occurs because of an issue in earlier versions of the VMware ESXi host. This issue is more likely to occur when the virtual machine uses Windows 2008 or later as the guest OS and it uses the VMware Tools VSS provider to take quiesced snapshots. For more information, see VMware KB article 2145664.

DNVMWARE-1623, DNVMWARE-1671 (31423, 32123)

If you use VMware Virtual Volumes (VVols) with a storage array that does not support thick-provisioned disks by default, you might receive the following error message: Error creating disk Error creating VVol Object. This may be due to insufficient available space on the datastore or the datastore’s inability to support the selected provisioning type.

Workaround: To allow VVols to create thick-provisioned disks, enable thick provisioning on the storage array. For more information, see http://pubs.vmware.com/Release_Notes/en/horizon-6-view/horizon-62-view-release-notes.html.

DNVMWARE-1712 (32714)

Operating systems

For a list of supported OS distributions and versions, see the VDDK 6.5 Release Notes.

NetVault Backup versions

The Plug‑in for VMware 11.4 requires NetVault Backup 11.1 or later.

For complete supported-platform information, see the Quest NetVault Backup Compatibility Guide available at https://support.quest.com/technical-documents.