NetVault Plug-in for VMware 10.5 - Release Notes

Dell™ NetVault™ Backup Plug‑in for VMware® 10.5

These release notes provide information about the Dell™ NetVault™ Backup Plug‑in for VMware® release.

•	About this release

•	New features

•	Enhancements

•	Resolved issues

•	Known issues

•	System requirements

•	Product licensing

•	Getting started with Plug‑in for VMware 10.5

•	Globalization

•	About Dell

About this release

Dell NetVault Backup Plug‑in for VMware (Plug‑in for VMware) protects your virtual machines from disaster, media failure, and data corruption. Its intuitive, easy-to-use interface gives you a single, centralized console to configure backup and restore policies for your virtual environments. The Plug‑in for VMware is integrated with VMware vStorage APIs for Data Protection (VADP). It allows you to protect your virtual environment without the need for complex scripting or deep understanding of VMware® ESX® or VADP internals. The plug-in minimizes downtime by allowing you to restore complete virtual machine images or individual files quickly and reliably with minimal interaction. Through automatic integration with a wide range of backup devices, your virtualized data can be protected and safely stored off-site to meet your disaster recovery and business continuity goals.

Dell NetVault Backup Plug‑in for VMware 10.5 is a minor release, with new features and functionality. See New features and Enhancements.

 

IMPORTANT: Starting with 10.0, NetVault Backup provides a web-based user interface to configure, manage, and monitor your NetVault Backup system and installed plug-ins. The procedures described in the user’s guide for this version of the plug-in are intended for the new NetVault WebUI. For procedures based on the NetVault Backup Console (user interface available with NetVault Backup 9.x), see the documentation for an earlier version of the plug-in.

 

IMPORTANT: The Plug‑in for VMware 10.5 can only be installed on 64-bit operating systems as the 32-bit libraries are no longer supported by the Virtual Disk Development Kit (VDDK). This applies to both Windows® and Linux® systems.

New features

New features in Plug‑in for VMware 10.5:

•

Added the ability to restart failed backups: The Plug‑in for VMware lets you to restart a job to back up only those virtual machines that failed previously. To use this method, you must configure the backup option Enable Restartable backups for the job. When you restart a job, the plug-in runs an Incremental Backup job to back up the failed virtual machines.

 

NOTE: The Restart method can only be used with NetVault Backup 11.0 and later.

•	Added a Diagnose Virtual Machine method: The Diagnose Virtual Machine method includes some pre‑defined tests, which are used to identify issues in virtual machine setup that can cause failures when the plug-in performs the following activities:

•	Access the VMDK files

•	Check CBT status and capabilities

•	Create quiesced snapshots

See also:

•	Enhancements

•	Resolved issues

Enhancements

The following is a list of enhancements implemented in Plug‑in for VMware 10.5.

 

Table 1. Enhancements

Enhancement	Issue ID
Added the option to disable quiescing of virtual machines. When you disable quiescing, the plug‑in uses crash-consistent snapshots to perform backups.	21161
Improved log messages to make it easier to diagnose faults. Other logging-related changes: • Updated log messages to display virtual machine names instead of task IDs and process IDs. • Added a warning message for unsupported vCenter/ESXi Server versions.	27829
Added context object to the log message “<n> files could not be indexed” to provide the list of fragmented files that could not be indexed during file-level backups.	27951
Changed the default transport mode to Auto on new installations. Depending on your setup, the plug-in automatically selects the SAN or SCSI HotAdd mode without requiring any re‑configuration.	28876
Removed the Use Volume Shadow Copy Service check box from the Backup Preferences dialog box. This option is not supported by plug-in versions 2.x and later.	29182
Removed SAN and SCSI HotAdd mode from the fallback transport mode list to prevent incorrect configuration.	29385