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**UPDATED** Quality Wins Every Time: vSphere 5.1 Support

Drew_Meyer
Level 4
Employee Accredited

STATUS UPDATE 2/25/14: In case you somehow missed the news, on November 19, 2013 Backup Exec SP3 came out and includes support for vSphere 5.5.

 

STATUS UPDATE 4/7/13: Backup Exec 2010 and 2012 will both support vSphere 5.1 in their next service packs, due in July. Beta testing starts in May so read here for more details and a link to sign up.
 

STATUS UPDATE 1/17/13: We stated earlier that we had uncovered significant quality concerns when testing VMware’s vSphere 5.1 APIs with Symantec backup products. After close work together, VMware acknowledged these issues and announced the VDDK 5.0 Update 1 APIs.

Here’s the latest information for customers using or planning to use VMware vSphere 5.1:

  1. Backup Exec will support vSphere 5.1 in the patch releases for both BE 2010 and BE2012. More details and beta program registration are available here.
  2. NetBackup 7.5.0.4 is now qualified for use with vSphere 5.1. The details are available here.

We thank our friends at VMware for their efforts and appreciate your patience while we aligned on quality joint solutions.

 

ORIGINAL POST: We’ve seen backup complexity explode in the last few years, encompassing tape, disk, physical, virtual, de-duplication and cloud components. Data quantities are increasing exponentially and virtualization is expanding its footprint in all IT environments. Symantec is committed to making backup and recovery functions as reliable as possible during this environmental evolution.

In the last decade Symantec and VMware have jointly developed solutions for the most advanced and complex virtual environments in the world. We are humbled and grateful that customers continue to choose NetBackup or Backup Exec more often with VMware than any other option.

Symantec and VMware are unwaveringly dedicated to quality in our jointly developed solutions. During our testing with the VMware vStorage 5.1 API Symantec encountered issues* that introduce risk performing consistent backups and ensuring reliable restores. We raised these concerns with our friends at VMware, who documented them in their knowledge base and in the VMware vSphere 5.1 release notes.  VMware expects a vStorage API update, and at that time we expect to retest and once again support joint solutions.

During these weeks of close examination VMware also confirmed that any 3rd party vendor depending on the current API may be impacted by these issues. We can only conclude that compatibility and support claims from other vendors are either poorly informed or possibly represent a more cavalier “ship-and-fix” data protection approach than Symantec is willing to accept. We welcome your questions and comments.

Sincerely,

The Symantec Backup Exec and NetBackup teams

@backupexec
@netbackup
@vmware

*Three specific issues are called out in the VMware vSphere 5.1 release notes:

  • Occasional segmentation-violation crashes during library disconnect
  • Hang in connect or cleanup due to intermittent race condition
  • Disk Open fails without an SSL thumbprint from vCenter