schrammd
16 years agoLevel 5
Snapshot error status 156 using VCB
Enviro:
NB 6.5.3.1 on dedicated master, media and proxy.
Proxy attached to 2 CLARiiONS, one for source vmdks, the other for snapshot cache.
VCB 1.5
Windows Server 2003 R2 SP2 x64 is the VCB proxy. Attached to array over 2Gb FC.
VM Backup : 1
transfer type: 3
vmdk type: 1
Seems like if backing up one VM at a time will work. Running them in "streams" all results in snapshot errors although I don't see any bottlenecks anywhere. When I setup the VCB policy I enabled 5 streams. When the jobs kick off, only the first one was successful, the others all fail with "- Critical bpbrm(pid=5932) from client qa01: FTL - snapshot creation failed, status 156".
90% of our VM's are Linux so all I care about is fulls I guess. I'm attaching the bpfis log from the proxy, the bpvmutil log has nothing relavent to this issue as the discovery is all running fine, just incredibly slow. Has anyone seen this issue? thanks in advance.
There are multiple failing commands and errors but I do not see how to resolve this based on other posts.
NB 6.5.3.1 on dedicated master, media and proxy.
Proxy attached to 2 CLARiiONS, one for source vmdks, the other for snapshot cache.
VCB 1.5
Windows Server 2003 R2 SP2 x64 is the VCB proxy. Attached to array over 2Gb FC.
VM Backup : 1
transfer type: 3
vmdk type: 1
Seems like if backing up one VM at a time will work. Running them in "streams" all results in snapshot errors although I don't see any bottlenecks anywhere. When I setup the VCB policy I enabled 5 streams. When the jobs kick off, only the first one was successful, the others all fail with "- Critical bpbrm(pid=5932) from client qa01: FTL - snapshot creation failed, status 156".
90% of our VM's are Linux so all I care about is fulls I guess. I'm attaching the bpfis log from the proxy, the bpvmutil log has nothing relavent to this issue as the discovery is all running fine, just incredibly slow. Has anyone seen this issue? thanks in advance.
There are multiple failing commands and errors but I do not see how to resolve this based on other posts.
- It is not documented, however the behavior you describe sounds like a similiar issue we are having where if you try to run multiple jobs against the same lun/datastore, only one will work and the other will fail with a status 156. I have heard that you can only snap one VM on a given lun at a time, although Symantec has not said anything about this.
In our environment we have many VM's per datastore (lun) and when we run multiple backups were the clients are on the same lun, we run into the snapshot error issue. If we run multiple jobs but have them on different luns, we have no issue. The problem is the quiesce step in the flow chart, it cannot be done for two jobs simultaneously. Our solution will be to create seperate policies for each of our datastores and run them simulatenously but have only one client per policy execute. That way we can load the proxy, and avoid the snapshot 156 errors due to lun constraint.
I am in the process of testing a perl script I wrote that self discovers the datastores and the clients on them through the Virtual Center using the Perl API tool from VMWare. Once the script discovers the datastores and clients, it injects them into the corresponding policies in Netbackup. Think of it as autodiscovery for Netbackup and VM's.
Are the given VM's that fail all on the same lun of the CLARiiON? Do you have VM's on other luns? What happens if you take a client from each of the luns and stick it into a test policy and allow all of them to run?
Regards,
Benjamin Schmaus