NetVault Plug-in for VMware 12.1 - Release Notes

Corrected an issue that caused the encoding of a name to be scrambled or not display at all. This issue occurred when you browsed a localized virtual machine from an X11 or Motif GUI.

DNVMWARE-664 (13679, VMW-157)

Corrected an issue that prevented a restore job from targeting an alternate Datacenter.

DNVMWARE-1425

Corrected an issue that prevented the renaming of a Chinese virtual machine during a restore job.

DNVMWARE-1543

Corrected an issue that caused backups to stop working when the default VMware path-format was not used.

DNVMWARE-1710

Corrected an issue that prevented backups from succeeding when a portion of the virtual machines or folders under a parent node were excluded from the saveset for a backup job

DNVMWARE-1832

Corrected an issue in which restoring a virtual machine on a VMware Virtual Volume (VVol) datastore used the storage policy associated with the VVol instead of using the storage policy associated with the backup.

DNVMWARE-1871

Corrected an issue that prevented restoring a virtual machine from a VMware vCenter Server 6.7 to an alternate vCenter Server 6.0, vCenter Server 6.5, VMware ESXi Server 6.0, or ESXI Server 6.5. Although the hardware version was compatible, the following error was displayed: “Failed to add virtual machine to target server's inventory.”

DNVMWARE-1851, DNVMWARE-1853, DNVMWARE-1854, DNVMWARE-1858, DNVMWARE-1859, DNVMWARE-1860

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)

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)

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 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)

Backups that have Active Block Mapping (ABM) enabled might stop working when memory is exceeded.

DNVMWARE-1584

Backing up a virtual machine succeeds if the Virtual Machine Disk (VMDK) fails to open and the Exclude data disks option is selected.

DNVMWARE-1696

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)

Support of virtual-machine encryption became available starting with vSphere 6.5; however, the plug-in does not support backup and restore of encrypted disks.

DNVMWARE-1773

If you are using the Distributed Jobs feature for load balancing, be aware that the plug-in excludes NetVault Backup Clients that are using Plug‑in for VMware 12.0 and NetVault Backup Clients that are managed by a server that is using NetVault Backup Server 12.0.

Workaround: Update the NetVault Backup Server and all applicable NetVault Backup Clients to 12.1.

DNVMWARE-1901, DNVMWARE-1903

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.

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)

CentOS and Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 6.x:

If you are using either of these operating systems and versions and the Fallback Transport Mode is set to none, a VMware issue prevents the backup proxy from opening in HotAdd Transport Mode and causes it to open in network block device (NBD) mode instead.

DNVMWARE-1777

Operating systems

For a list of supported OS distributions and versions, see the VDDK 6.7 Release Notes.

NetVault Backup versions

The Plug‑in for VMware 12.1 requires NetVault Backup 12.1 or later.

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