*Updated 04.09.12
The reason behind this post…
The customer was using TSM for VE (tivolli storage manager for virtual environments) v5.x to backup their current VMware environment (ESXi 4.1).
The guest OS was Windows Server 2008 R2 and the backups would consistently fail to complete, throwing time-out errors during snapshot creation, but would sometimes complete if forced individually. The initial work-around was to set the diskUUID=false, and then let the backups run. Sometimes they would complete, other times they would time out.
The other problem with having the diskUUID set to false, was that they were only getting file level backups, when they needed application level.
After a month with IBM technical support (great group of people btw), the issue was definitely not found with TSMVE, and it was going to have to be addressed within the VMware environment.
So digging through various KB articles, and reading many blogs by other IT professionals, these were the changes that resolved many issues, after the configurations changes, the environment was now effectively:
- giving application-consistent backups
- snapshots no longer timing out when initiated by Tivolli (est. 8 seconds to complete)
- successful restores
All of this by disabling VMware's VSS writers, and enabling the Guest VSS, the application was able to be quiesced.
Thank you! I am currently having the same problem with netbackup and will give it a shot.
ReplyDeletePlease let me know how it goes for you, and if there were any extra steps you had to take to get it to work with net backup.
DeleteIt worked! (had to schedule some downtime to correct this) and no extra steps were needed.
DeleteThat is great news!! I am very glad that this worked out for you ~
DeleteGreat post! Worked like a charm with no extra steps needed. Keep up the good work!
ReplyDelete