We have had several backups fail, but worse, we have had some restores bomb out (like 300mb away from the end of a 15gb restore), and even worse yet, we have had some restores work, but the .vmdk came back corrupted and vmware couldn't even mount it. We are planning on using this method to do DR recovery of our AD environment, so a reliable backup/restore is *fairly* important.
We have seen this in the dsmerror.log on the vmhost after a failed restore: 06/24/04 14:21:44 The 299579424th code was found to be out of sequence. The code (424) was greater than (262), the next available slot in the string table. 06/24/04 14:21:44 The 299579425th code was found to be out of sequence. The code (288) was greater than (263), the next available slot in the string table. 06/24/04 14:21:44 The 299579446th code was found to be out of sequence. The code (384) was greater than (267), the next available slot in the string table. We have a call in to Tivoli, but nothing in the way of a concrete fix yet... -----Original Message----- From: ADSM: Dist Stor Manager [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Stapleton, Mark Sent: Wednesday, May 25, 2005 11:32 AM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: [ADSM-L] Vmware guest "hot" backups From: ADSM: Dist Stor Manager [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Steve Schaub >My team & I would be interested in speaking with anyone who has been >successful in using TSM to backup/restore what the database folks would >call a "hot" backup of VMWare guest machines (i.e. backing up the .vmdk >files while the guest is in redo mode). > >We have run several test backup/restores, some less successful than >others. >We are using ESX 2.5 currently. > >If you have gotten this to work consistantly and would be willing to >share your experience, please email me directly: [EMAIL PROTECTED] ><mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Yep, as long as we're talking VMWare ESX. The GSX documentation explicitly says that the only supported backups of VM occur only when the VM is shut down prior to backup. The ESX software allows for a "freeze" of a VM (with the use of a REDO log) as you describe; while the VM is frozen, the .vmdk file can be backed up reliably. Once the backup is complete, the log is committed, and you're done. What problems are you having? -- Mark Stapleton ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) IBM Certified Advanced Deployment Professional Tivoli Storage Management Solutions 2005 IBM Certified Advanced Technical Expert (CATE) AIX Office 262.521.5627 Please see the following link for the BlueCross BlueShield of Tennessee E-mail disclaimer: http://www.bcbst.com/email_disclaimer.shtm
