NetVault Plug-in for VMware 10.5 - Release Notes

Resolved issues

The following is a list of issues addressed in Plug‑in for VMware 10.5.

 

Table 2. Resolved issues: Plug‑in for VMware 10.5

Resolved issue	Issue ID
Implemented changes to discard partial index entries if all components are not backed up successfully for a virtual machine. This change ensures that only successful virtual machines are listed in the restore selection tree.	2640
Improved handling of non-ASCII character sets so that messages are displayed correctly when Character Code Conversions do not match for the vCenter/ESX Server and the NetVault Backup Server.	13754
Modified the file-level indexing process to discard invalid entries if indexing fails for a virtual machine.	22036
Corrected an issue that caused a restore job to fail when a file that was included in a Full image‑level backup was restored from an Incremental Backup of the virtual machine.	22321
Addressed an issue that caused the plug-in to report job status as “completed with warnings” when all selected virtual disks were successfully backed up. The plug-in generated warnings for virtual disks that were not selected for backup.	26364
Modified the plug-in to use positive DeviceKey IDs when restoring SATA CDROM devices.	26374
Corrected an issue that caused the file-level restore jobs to crash when restoring NTFS sparse files.	27587
Corrected an issue that caused a restore job to fail when the virtual disks were stored on different datastores.	27804
Addressed an issue that caused restore jobs to fail with the error “Failed to uniquely locate VM in server inventory” when individual disks were selected for restore.	28942
Corrected an issue that caused a restore job to fail with the errors “Snapshot load failed” and “File not found” when a virtual machine was renamed during restore.	28993
Addressed issues that caused file-level indexing to fail if the backup selection included files that were marked as “not in use.”	29091
Updated the plug-in to remove snapshots for hotadded disks when a backup job fails or it is aborted. Previously, the snapshots were left in a locked state and the vSphere Client displayed an error message when you tried to consolidate the virtual machine.	29256
Corrected an issue that caused a crash when printing filenames of omitted files.	29295
Corrected an issue that caused a child process to crash when the plug-in opened the virtual disks for restore. The process generated the following trace log message: VixDiskLibVim_GetNfcTicket: Get NFC ticket for [datastore]	29619

Known issues

The following is a list of issues, including those attributed to third-party products, known to exist at the time of release.

 

Table 3. Known issues

Known issue	Issue ID
When restoring data to an alternate datastore, the plug-in does not check if the datastore is available. You must verify that the datastore is valid and has sufficient disk space to accommodate the virtual machine.	1714
If you remove a VMware Server, and re-add the server with the same name but a different hostname (or IP address), the plug-in does not allow you to open the server node without first terminating the nvvmware.exe process from the Windows Task Manager.	2338
The “.nvram” and “.vmx” files must reside in the same directory. Otherwise, you must manually edit the file path for the “.nvram” file after restoring the data.	2368
Raw Disk 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.	2371
On Linux-based clients, an image-level backup job may fail if a failover occurs during the job. If this error occurs, you must re-run the job after the failover completes.	2383
If you select the Auto setting as the primary transport mode, during the backup of a virtual machine that has disks on SAN storage as well as storage accessible only through the network, the NetVault Backup logs may report the transport mode incorrectly as “san” when the disk is opened in a network-based mode (nbd or nbdssl).	2394
VDDK uses a kernel-mode driver for mounting a virtual machine during file-level backup and browse operations. The Plug‑in for VMware automatically starts a service for the driver when you install the plug-in, but it does not delete the service when you remove the plug-in. Moreover, the plug-in does not check if the service is running when you perform an upgrade or a reinstallation. If this service is not running on the client, the plug-in fails to complete the mount request and reports the error “Driver not found.”	2810
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 a large number of backups running simultaneously or your server is running under heavy load, modify the value for the [Custom:MountOperationTimeoutSecs] setting to avoid running into this situation.	3131
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.	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.	6598
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 appear at all.	13679
You cannot back up virtual machine templates using the Plug‑in for VMware. Workaround: The workaround is to convert the template to a virtual machine.	13728
Restore to alternate ESX Server fails when you use vNetwork Distributed Switch (vDS).	13744
A virtual machine cannot be restored if the name of the target resource pool includes characters from the double-byte character set. Workaround: Restore the virtual machine to the root resource pool by specifying “/” in the Allocate to Different Resource Pool box. After the restore completes, manually move the virtual machine to the desired resource pool using the vSphere Client.	13782
To avoid file fragmentation, the Plug‑in for VMware pre-allocates disk space before restoring files to disk. On Linux-based systems, files that are larger than 50MB in size are not pre‑allocated full disk space. Such files are handled like 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 50MB in size, the job fails when the disk runs out of space.	21755
The file-level indexing process does not generate indexes for symlinks.	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 completely separate entities. When you restore a saveset that includes a hard link, the plug-in crashes.	21794
When a standalone VMware ESX or 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.	22030
When restoring the virtual machine disk and configuration files from an image-level backup, if you select an Incremental Backup with the Restore Files from Backup method, the plug-in only restores the Full Backup for the selected backup sequence.	22043
If the virtual machine name includes non-ASCII characters, the Restore Files from Backup method restores an invalid “.vmx” file, which cannot be used to create a virtual machine using the VMware Converter utility. For such virtual machines, you must manually create a new virtual machine using the restored “.vmdk” files.	23036 23037
Plug-in for VMware 2.6 issues: • When you upgrade to NetVault Backup 10.0 Server on a Windows machine running Plug-in for VMware 2.6, the existing version of the SSL DLLs are overwritten. When you remove Plug-in for VMware 2.6, these DLLs are also removed. Therefore, before removing the plug-in, you must take a copy of the libeay32.dll and ssleay32.dll files from the <NetVault Home>\bin directory, and restore them to the same directory after removing the plug-in. Otherwise, the NetVault Backup Service does not start. • If you install Plug-in for VMware 2.6 on a Windows-based NetVault Backup 10.0 Server, the NetVault Backup Service does not start.	24156
When restoring an Incremental or a Differential Backup using SAN mode, the plug-in, in some configurations, may not automatically fall back to NBD mode. Workaround: Set the transport mode manually to NBD.	25414
When using the NBD transport mode, a large Read Block Size may prevent multiple backup processes from running at the same time. Workaround: Use SAN or SCSI Hot-Add transport modes or decrease Read Block Size.	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.	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.	29795

 

Table 4. Third-party known issues

Known issue	Issue ID
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: • Locking a virtual machine may not always succeed even though API indicates success. This issue is under review with VMware. This failure can be ignored in most cases. • Unlocking is known to fail occasionally. This issue has been documented in the VDDK 5 release notes. For details, review the “EndAccess sometimes does not reenable migration after PrepareForAccess” section in the VDDK 5.0 Release Notes. • If the plug-in exits unexpectedly after locking a virtual machine, the virtual machine may be left in a locked state so that it is disabled for migration. For information about removing the lock and enabling migration for the virtual machine, see http://kb.vmware.com/kb/2008957.
VDDK 5 issues: • Backup fails on a Linux-based client if any other virtual machine is in a powered on state on the same datastore. • Backup fails on a Linux-based client if parallel backup jobs (performed from different clients) access the same datastore.
When you restore a virtual machine that was previously renamed on a vCenter Server, the plug-in creates both the old and new virtual machines on the server. Workaround: After restoring the backup, rename the virtual machine, and then, move the virtual machine to another datastore. This merges the two folders created during the restore into a single folder.
ESX/ESXi Servers do not support non-ASCII characters; this causes the restore jobs to fail if the virtual machine name uses multibyte characters. For more information, see http://kb.vmware.com/kb/1003866.
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 disk is 2TB or a multiple of 2TB, 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 disk (for example, to 2.01 TB, 3.99 TB).	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.	28921

System requirements

Before installing the Plug‑in for VMware 10.5, ensure that your system meets the following requirements.

 

Table 5. System requirements

Requirement	Details
Operating systems	For a list of supported OS distributions and versions, see the VDDK 6.0 Release Notes available at https://www.vmware.com/support/developer/vddk/vddk-600-releasenotes.html.
NetVault Backup versions	The Plug‑in for VMware 10.5 requires NetVault Backup 9.2 or later. For complete supported-platform information, see the NetVault Backup Plug-in Compatibility Guide available at https://support.quest.com/.

 

NOTE: To use the Virtual Disk Development Kit (VDDK) with OEM ESXi, you require VMware ESX Foundation, Standard, or Enterprise license. This license can be obtained from OEM or VMware directly.

Upgrade and compatibility

•	Edit the programs.cfg file after upgrading to NetVault Backup 11.0: After installing Plug‑in for VMware 10.5, if you upgrade to NetVault Backup 11.0, you must edit the programs.cfg file to disable creation of detached processes.

You must also complete this configuration to use the previous versions of the plug-in (Plug‑in for VMware 10.0.5 and earlier) with NetVault Backup 11.0.

To disable creation of detached process

•	Open the programs.cfg file in a text editor. You can find this file in the config directory under the NetVault Backup installation directory.

•	Add the following lines:

[VMware Plugin]

winnt=bin\nvvmware.exe

detached=false

[Virtual Machines]

winnt=bin\nvvmware.exe

detached=false

•	Save and close the file.

•

Cannot browse mounted virtual machines after upgrading NetVault Backup: After installing the plug‑in, if you upgrade the NetVault Backup software, you must re-install the plug-in on that machine. Otherwise, you will be unable to open the Drives node of a mounted virtual machine for any new file‑level backups.

•	Restart the NetVault Backup Service if “nvvmwmount.exe” was running during upgrade: If the mount process “nvvmwmount.exe” was running during an upgrade from 2.x, restart the NetVault Backup Service on the client.

•	Select the correct installation package on Linux: Starting with 10.0, NetVault Backup offers separate client-only and server-only installation packages for Linux-based systems. Both the server and the client packages are available in hybrid and pure 64-bit versions:

•	Hybrid server and client packages: The hybrid packages (LinuxX86HybridServer and LinuxX86Hybrid) are intended for Linux users who do not have a pure 64-bit-only requirement.

These packages let you upgrade from pure 32-bit as well as hybrid installations of NetVault Backup. The hybrid packages retain binary compatibility with all previous versions of 32-bit and 64-bit plug-ins. These packages also work on 32-bit systems that do not have 64-bit capability.

•

Pure 64-bit server and client packages: The pure 64-bit packages (LinuxX86Pure64Server and LinuxX86Pure64) packages are intended for pure 64-bit Linux distributions. If you have a specific reason that you cannot use any 32-bit components (for example, you are using a Linux distribution that does not run 32-bit code), use these packages.

The pure 64-bit packages cannot be used to upgrade existing pure 32-bit or hybrid NetVault Backup installations. You must remove the existing pure 32-bit or hybrid version and install the pure 64-bit version separately. To reduce confusion, warning messages have been added to both the upgrade and installation packages to ensure that you understand that they are not compatible.

Depending on your OS type, verify that you select the correct installation package to install the NetVault Backup Server or Client software:

•	LinuxX86HybridServer: Use this package to install or upgrade NetVault Backup Server on 32- or 64-bit Linux systems.

•	LinuxX86Hybrid: Use this package to install or upgrade NetVault Backup Client on 32- or 64-bit Linux systems.

•	LinuxX86Pure64Server: Use this package to install or upgrade NetVault Backup Server on pure 64-bit Linux systems.

•	LinuxX86Pure64: Use this package to install or upgrade NetVault Backup Client on pure 64-bit Linux systems.

 

Table 6. Pure64 builds

OS	Core Build	Plug-in
		32-bit	64-bit	Hybrid	Itanium	Pure64
32-bit	32-bit
	Hybrid
64-bit	Itanium	N/A	N/A	N/A	N/A	N/A
	64-bit	N/A	N/A	N/A	N/A	N/A
	Hybrid					X
	Pure64					X

 

NOTE: X = Compatible This table is only applicable to the Linux version of the Plug‑in for VMware.