Thursday, January 26, 2012

VADP / VCB backup failed with hotadd mode

I am testing the VADP backup and keep getting the following error.

"Unable to open a disk of the virtual machine"

Monitor the VC and do see snapshot created.  Run the same backup with nbd and it works fine.  Double check and find out ESX license in on Standard Edition with version 4.1.  

Remember this is a license issue and confirm from VM site VDDK 5.0 release note.

"Licensing. In vSphere 5.0, the SCSI HotAdd feature is enabled only for vSphere editions Enterprise and higher, which have Hot Add licensing enabled. No separate Hot Add license is available for purchase as an add-on. In vSphere 4.1, Hot Add capability was also allowed in Advanced edition. Therefore, customers with vSphere Essentials or Standard edition who use backup products (including VMware Data Recovery) are not able to perform proxy-based backup, which relies on SCSI HotAdd. Those customers must use alternate transport modes."

The most important benefit of using hotadd mode to me is to avoid presenting a VMFS lun to Windows proxy server.

P.S. HotAdd is not supported with VDDK 1.1.1 when proxy server is on ESX 4.1 even correct license is purchased.  See reference link VDDK-1.2.1 release notes

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