backup exec 2010 R3 VSS & Vmware

[GeoffRose]

Hi,

I have recently been testing backups of vmware guests using the new R3

I have had this come up a number of times:

V-79-8192-38331 - The backup has detected that both the VMware VSS Provider and the Symantec VSS Provider have been installed on the virtual machine '0501-UTL001.boym.local'. However, only one VSS Provider can be used on a virtual machine. You must uninstall the VMware VSS Provider.

My question is if I uninstall the VMware VSS provider can I still make VMware snapshots?

Thanks

Geoff.

[AmolB]

In the job properties under the Advance open file option select "Microsoft VSS + Snapshot provider

as System use Microsoft shadow copy provider"

[teiva-boy]

VMware snapshots can work just fine without a VSS provider.  In this case for BackupExec and more specifically application specific snaps, you will want the BackupExec VSS provider.  It's common practice on the VMware tools to do a custom install and remove it's own VSS driver.  This was a common thing since the Vmware agent for BE2010 came out.

[Simon_B_ · Accepted solution]

The AOFO settings have no influence on vmware backups.

To explain a bit more what happens when you do a AVVI backup:

BE notifies the ESX server through vstorage api that it wants to do a snapshot for a vm. ESX then triggers the vmware tools inside the VM which then try to get the system into a consistent state through 2 different things:

• trigger the VSS provider
• activate the file system sync driver (only on 32Bit)

The VSS provider can be either from VMware (thats what you got when you just install vmware tools on a vm) or the Symantec BEVSS Provider. When you install the remote agent on the VM it automatically removes the Vmware VSS Provider. So everything is fine, except for the case that you run an automatic vmware tools upgrade AFTER installing RAWS, which then will lead to both vss providers installed.

When the BEVSS Provider is triggered it fires all vss writers that are present on the system (vssadmin list writers) to bring their applications to a consistent state. If, and only if that succeeded and did not take a large amount of time the vmware tools will tell the esx server that the guest filesystem was successfully quiesced, the esx server performs the snapshot and BE starts to read the data from this snapshot.

Coming back to your question: Exactly the same process happens when you manually take a snapshot on the esx server and select "quiesce guest file system". So yes - it really is no problem to perform standard esx snapshots when the BE provider is installed.

One thing however you should be aware of: It can cause issues when other snapshots already exist for this VM. So it is recommended to always remove existing snapshots before performing an AVVI backup.

Regards

[GeoffRose]

Thanks all,

I actually dont use open file - ive found it doesnt make much difference.

I have one network where the agents were installed/upgraded after vmtools and it doesnt report the error.

On my other network I am getting the error where this maybe the case - im upgrading the agent on a server that is giving the error that I misses when doing the rest so will be interesting to see if it reports the error.

Interestingly my media server (which has a map to an iscsi drive that gets backed up) is also reporting that the agent is out of date! quite strange and it obviously cannot be installed on this computer - I am waiting to see if this is gone when all the RAWS are ok.

I also had 2 servers that would not install the R3 client - it was locking up when trying to install PDVFSdriver - see post below

also has anyone else noticed how R3 errors point to this server for more information but it never works

http://ced.symantec.com

Seems Symantec has forgotten that this is where their help is now going.

[GeoffRose]

Spent another couple of hours on this last night - The PDVFSdriver issue was happening on a few servers

It seems to be a bug in the R3 client when trying to upgrade an existing RAWS agent.

To fix I had to uninstall the RAWS agent from the server then reboot then install the new version

I had one server that didnt uninstall correctly so had to remove it manually then reboot then install