Quest® vRanger® 7.6.4
These release notes provide information about the Quest® vRanger® release.
About this release
vRanger Backup & Replication is the market-leading backup, recovery, and backup-management solution for VMware® and Hyper-V® virtual environments. vRanger automatically discovers new virtual machines (VMs), reduces backup windows, provides smarter backup options, and offers more scalability through its agent-less architecture and features while using fewer resources.
vRanger 7.6.4 is a maintenance release with minor enhancements related to product rebranding. See Enhancements and Resolved issues for more detailed information.
Enhancements
The following is a list of enhancements implemented in vRanger 7.6.4.
Table 1. General enhancements
Final rebranding with respect to NetVault SmartDIsk integration
Resolved issues
There are no customer-facing defects resolved in this release.
Known issues
Table 2. Installation known issues
The vRanger Service does not start after installing vRanger on WIndows Server 2008 R2 SP1.
If the Quest vRanger Service is installed with a user other than the currently logged in user, use mixed-mode authentication for SQL Server® and authenticate with the system administrator (sa) user.
Alternatively, Windows®-only authentication can be used if the following workaround is implemented.
3 Replace VRANGER\vRangerServiceUser with the name of the vRanger service user in the following command:
2 When the Charms bar appears, select the Start icon.
3
4 Using the scroll bar at the bottom, scroll right to the Quest section.
5
6The uninstall starts as it normally does.
You may also uninstall vRanger using the Programs and Features application in the Control Panel.
When a proxy server is configured on the vRanger machine, vRanger may not be able to connect to VMware® vCenter™ Servers or NetVault SmartDisk repositories.
If you are unsure what the account is, use Microsoft Management Console (MMC) to check the services.msc file.
2 Open Internet Explorer® (IE) while logged-in with the account.
3 Go to Internet Options > Connections > LAN settings; this location varies depending on the version of IE installed on the machine.
4 Make sure that no proxy information is defined, and no proxy server is being used.
5 Clear the automatically detect settings check box, in case your particular environment has an automatic proxy script set up.During an upgrade, the vRanger Upgrade Installer might not delete the previous vRanger Pro Service event log. This exclusion causes the vRanger user interface (UI) to hang and display a “Could not connect to the service” message after the upgrade. To remove the log manually, complete the following steps:
1 Disable the Event Log service.
3
5 Restart the Event Log service.
Table 4. Backup known issues
VA-based Hot add backups fail with Error: -1 - An unknown error has occurred.
When performing SAN backups of VMs created in VMware® vCloud Director® from a template, the backup may fail with the “Error: 2760 - <VIXcannotOpenDetails> VIX can’t open…” error.
The VMware SAN mode transport searches for VMs by BIOS UUID. By default, all instances and VMs that are deployed from a given catalog vApps/template in vCloud Director are assigned the same BIOS UUID. For more information, see VMware KB article 1002403.
To resolve this issue, perform the workaround documented in VMware KB article 2002506.
When performing a quiesced backup of a Windows Server 2012 VM without using vzShadow.exe, event log errors are generated for System Reserved volumes during snapshot creation.
The VMware QueryChangedDiskAreas API returns incorrect sectors after extending the VM VMDK file with CBT enabled. This issue causes the CBT filter to become invalid, possibly corrupting vRanger backups. For more information, see VMware KB article 2090639.
Ensure that the patches described in VMware KB article 2090639 are applied, and follow other workaround recommendations documented in the KB as appropriate for your environment.
When using the vzShadow.exe executable to perform application-consistent backups, lettered drives are required. The use of vzShadow.exe to quiesce mount points with databases is not supported.
For options to resolve this issue, see VMware KB article 1037071.
When performing full backups with CBT enabled, the CBT operation may fail with the “Change Block Tracking not enabled on <disk>” error. When performing incremental or differential backups of the same VMs, CBT functions properly.
The following scenarios have been shown to cause this error, although not in all cases:
• VMware® ESXi™ host crash
• Storage vMotion® of the VM — while powered off
•Sometimes, performing the following steps resolves this issue.
Sometimes, deleting the *ctk.vmdk file for each disk in the affected VM resolves this issue.
To ensure that ISO images are attached to a VM when restored:
•
• Ensure that the restore job option Force Power On is enabled.Some restore tasks fail with the “Error: Restore command exited unexpectedly” error.
This issue is caused by a known issue with the VMware VDDK titled “Possible segmentation violation if running multiple backup processes.” For more information, see the VMware VDDK 5.0 Release Notes.
When a standalone ESXi 5 host is added to the vRanger inventory, and that Host is associated with a vSphere® 5 vCenter that is not in the vRanger inventory, restore operations to that host fail with the error:
“<host> is being managed by a Virtual Center. Please disassociate the host from the Virtual Center before continuing a Restore operation or register the Virtual Center in vRanger.”
Association is a new relationship introduced in vSphere 5, whereby some host resources are managed only by an associated vCenter, and not the host itself. The Host, therefore, does not have permission to perform the operations required to restore a VM. If the vCenter is not in the vRanger inventory, vRanger cannot obtain the required permissions.
When performing a Linux® FLR operation that recovers files and folders with the following characters in the name, the files and folders are displayed with what look to be randomly generated names, and are restored successfully with same random names. Characters that cause this behavior are:
FLR from a Windows Server 2012 VM, the contents of the mounted disk are not displayed.
To perform an FLR for a Windows Server 2012, install vRanger on Windows Server 2012.
The vRanger cataloging feature does not support operation against dynamic disks.
If the disk hardware is changed between physical backup or restore tasks, the job should be updated to reflect such changes to ensure that the intended disks are included. In some instances, rebooting the target server causes disks to change IDs — see Microsoft article http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/bb968801(v=vs.85).aspx. This change to the IDs results in a machine whose effective hardware has changed.
When deploying the vRanger physical client to a physical server, the account used to install and run the client must have administrative Log on as a service rights. If this computer is a node in a cluster, check that this user right is assigned to the Cluster service account on all nodes in the cluster.
For instructions, see the Microsoft TechNet article Add the Log on as a service right to an account.
When configuring repositories using the vAPI, use forward slashes.
If this error is observed, perform the following actions:
1 On the source server, open the Windows firewall, and select Change Settings. In the Exception tab, select Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI).
2 On the source server, verify that the Remote Procedure Call (RPC) service is started and set to Automatic.
3 On the source server, verify that the Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) service is started and set to Automatic.When uninstalling the vRanger Physical Client, the following files are not removed from the physical client installation directory —C:\Program Files\Quest\vRangerPhysicalClient by default.
Table 7. Replication known issues
Replication to a target containing vRDM disks is not supported.
When a standalone ESXi host is added to the vRanger inventory, and that Host is associated with a vSphere vCenter not in the vRanger inventory, replication operations to that host fail with the error:
“<host> is being managed by a Virtual Center. Please disassociate the host from the Virtual Center before continuing a replication operation or register the Virtual Center in vRanger.”
Association is a relationship introduced in vSphere 5, whereby some host resources are managed only by an associated vCenter, and not the host itself. The Host, therefore, does not have permission to perform the operations required to replicate a VM. If the vCenter is not in the vRanger inventory, vRanger cannot obtain the required permissions.
6In the vSphere Client, select Continue with the VM Upgrade for the replica VM.
| \ / “ ‘ : ; < > , ? [ ] + = *
Do not use the preceding characters in the username or password used to authenticate to vCenter.
Table 8. Virtual appliance (VA) known issues
Deploying a VA to a standalone host fails if the host is managed by a vCenter.
4 Run the command: dmesg | grep "rename.*eth"You see two messages indicating the renaming of the real NICs with new Udev NIC names.
6 Run the command: cd /etc/sysconfigThis directory already contains one configuration file for the first NIC.
7 Run the following command to create and edit the configuration file for the new NIC where <IFname> is the new name for the new NIC card:vi ifconfig.<IFname>
== For DHCP (SAMPLE NIC Interface Name):
== For Static (SAMPLE NIC Interface Name & IP Addresses):
9 Restart networking by running the command: /etc/init.d/network restart
Table 9. Third-party known issues
vSphere 5 introduces the vStorage APIs VixDiskLib_PrepareForAccess() and VixDiskLib_EndAccess() to lock and unlock migration for individual VMs. It is observed that on occasion the VixDiskLib_EndAccess fails to unlock the VM and, as a result, that VM is left in a state where vMotion is permanently disabled.
Follow the steps documented in the VMware KB article 2008957.
The use of non-standard US-English ASCII characters in certain VM parameters can cause unexpected behavior to occur. For more information, see VMware KB article 1003866.
When special characters are used in a file or folder name, you cannot see that file or folder when browsing the datastore in vCenter. This issue is documented in more detail in the VMware KB article 1015650.
If the host name of a vCenter server contains a character that Tomcat does not support, retrieving health data fails with the “Unable to retrieve health data from <server>…” error. This error occurs because Tomcat requires that host names are RFC 952 complaint. For more information, see VMware KB article 1013507.
Cloning a custom Linux VM fails if the VMs computer name contains Extended-ASCII or non-ASCII characters. For more information, see VMware KB article 2004390.
When creating a Hyper-V backup job, mixing VMs with Cluster Shared Volumes (CSV) and non-CSV volumes is not supported. For more information, see Microsoft KB article 2771882.
When creating or running a backup job, the operation fails with the “Error: 2760 - <VIXcannotOpenDetails> VIX can’t open [XXXXX] XXXX/XXX.vmdk (The host is not licensed for this feature)” error.
To resolve this issue, remove the vSphere license and then add it back.
In some cases, VMware backup jobs may fail with the error “Error: -1 Backup process had an unexpected failure”. This is a known issue as documented in VMware KB article 2125497 and the VMware VDDK 6.0 Release Notes.
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