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VMware VDP and Backup Exec

Gccsolution7000
Level 1

 My company has been using Backup Exec for more than 10 years. In the last 3 or 4 years, we have migrated all of our physical servers to virtual servers. Earlier this year a company recommended using VMware VDP as a secondary backup solution along with Backup Exec. So we added the VDP appliance around March of this year and everything has been working. In the last 3 weeks, dozens of a backup job has been failing and backup exec keeps giving an error message that its unable to mount and take a snapshot of the VM's. I am starting to think that the VDP is locking the VM's and preventing Backup Exec from taking a snapshot. Does anyone have VDP as a secondary backup solution and if so have you experienced any issues with Backup Exec and VDP conflicting? 

1 REPLY 1

Colin_Weaver
Moderator
Moderator
Employee Accredited Certified

We do not officially test any scenarios with multiple backup products, which does leave you with an interesting problem with regards to official support. (although it is possible someone outside of Veritas on these forums may be able to contribute if they are doing or have tried the same thing)

Could of points of theory though:

Even if/when your jobs were running, I hope you don't use incremental or differential backup strategies whilst running two different backup products as there is a good chance that the backup chain will be incomplete if both products are resetting CBT (or because of the operation of VSS within the VMs, the transaction logs sequences against databases might be interrupted)

It would probably be a bad idea to have both backup products attempting backups on overlapping timings

If running this extra backup product results in lengthy snapshot chains (in Snapshot Manager) being maintained against the VMs then this might be the issue (especially if it worked for a while and then failed as the snapshot chain got longer)

If the use of VMware VDP means that some kind of software process has been installed on the BE server itself, then you may have caused a VDDK conflict (so I hope VDP runs on it's own servers and not on the BE one.)