NetVault Plug-in for VMware 10.0.5 - Release Notes

Dell™ NetVault™ Backup Plug‑in for VMware® 10.0.5, Revision 1

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

•	About Dell NetVault Backup Plug‑in for VMware 10.0.5

•	Enhancements

•	Resolved issues

•	Known issues

•	System requirements

•	Product licensing

•	Getting started with Plug‑in for VMware 10.0.5

•	Globalization

•	About Dell

About Dell NetVault Backup Plug‑in for VMware 10.0.5

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 10.0.5 is a minor release, with enhanced features and functionality. See 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.

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IMPORTANT: The Plug‑in for VMware 10.0.5 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.

Enhancements

The following is a list of enhancements implemented in Plug‑in for VMware 10.0.5.

 

Table 1. Enhancements

Enhancement	Issue ID
Added support for GUID partition table (GPT) volumes. The Plug‑in for VMware 10.0.5 uses VDDK 5.5.3, which includes support for GPT volumes.	21741
Added a restore option Split Restored Virtual Disks, which can be used when restoring virtual disk files to the local file system to specify whether the “.vmdk” files should be split into 2GiB files or restored as a single disk file. The check box is selected by default.	26396

Resolved issues

The following is a list of issues addressed in Plug‑in for VMware 10.0.5.7.

 

Table 2. Resolved issues: Plug‑in for VMware 10.0.5.7

Enhancement	Issue ID
Corrected an issue that caused restores to fail for virtual machines when the Rename option was used during restore.	28961

The following is a list of issues addressed in Plug‑in for VMware 10.0.5.

 

Table 3. Resolved issues: Plug‑in for VMware 10.0.5

Resolved issue	Issue ID
Addressed an issue that caused restore jobs to fallback to using NBD transport mode instead of SAN mode. When using SAN mode, consider the following: • During restores, the SAN transport mode offers the best performance on thick disks. On thin disks, NBD and NBDSSL transport modes are faster than the SAN mode. • During SAN restores, CBT must be disabled on virtual machines.	13762 25413
Added support for SAN multipath environment.	13776
Addressed issues that caused file-level indexing to fail if the backup selection included files that were marked as “not in use.”	22508
Modified the plug-in to replace invalid characters in filenames with underscore characters (“_”). Previously, file-level restores from image-level backups failed if a filename contained invalid characters, which were not supported by the host OS.	23151
Updated the plug-in to automatically remove the hotadded disks after an abnormal termination of a backup job. This issue has been fixed in VDDK 5.5.3. For more information, see https://www.vmware.com/support/developer/vddk/vddk-553-releasenotes.html.	25097
Modified the plug-in to exclude VMware log files from backups.	25099
Addressed an issue that caused restore jobs to fail in a cluster setup if the original ESXi host was in maintenance mode during restore.	25376
Corrected an issue that prevented the plug-in from enabling CBT on a Windows 2008 R2 (64-bit) virtual machine after you installed VMware tools on the machine.	26217
Corrected an issue that caused file-level indexing to omit volumes with the same name when the volumes were managed by Logical Volume Manager (LVM).	26375
Added a configuration setting Read Block Size, which can be used to specify the number of disk sectors to read or write per operation. The default value is 65536 sectors. Setting a large block size for read and write operations can improve backup performance.	26377
Corrected an issue that caused a restore job to fail when the virtual disks were stored on different datastores.	26381
Corrected an issue that caused a job to remain in “waiting for media” state after the Media request timeout interval expired; the job did not fail and it had to be aborted.	27026
Modified the plug-in to perform a Full Backup of the virtual disk if the backup process is unable to obtain the change ID from the last backup of the virtual disk during Incremental or Differential Backups. The following log message is added when the plug-in performs a Full Backup: TaskID %lu All sectors on disk '%s' will be backed up. Previously, the plug-in crashed if the backup process could not find the change ID.	27068
Modified the plug-in to remove BKB_SNAP snapshots from previous failed backups.	27176
Added log context to the Backup Report log message; the log context provides a list of virtual machines that generated warnings or error messages during backups.	27615
Corrected an issue that caused backups to fail with the error “No VMs selected for backup” when a folder was listed as the first item in the selection tree.	27617
Modified the plug-in to prevent call stack error conditions that occurred when recursive calls were made to a function to process the directory hierarchy during restore.	27918
Modified the function that incorrectly deleted the msvcr71.dll file from the NetVault Backup “bin” directory during plug-in installation.	28261
Modified the plug-in to re-authenticate a session if the session expires before a snapshot is removed for a failed process.	28497