NBU Master 7504, 2 x 5220 Media Servers N251 (7504), ESX5 Cluster, ESX4 Cluster.
I have seen a number of references to this issue but am unclear as to whether the issue lies with Netbackup or vCenter / ESX.
I am seeing an issue whereby at the end of a backup of a VM (using the vStorage API – VMWARE policy type) the snapshot is released OK (gone from snapshot manager in vCenter) but then vCenter logs an error message saying that disk consolidation failed and marks the VM as requiring disk consolidation.
This happens randomly to different VM’s (ESX5) and the next backup clears the error – or if a manual disk consolidation is started it also clears the issue.
It may be down to vCenter being busy at the time – not sure yet. This isn’t a busy VMware environment as this cluster is a new one with only a small number of VMs running at this point.
I need to know if Netbackup is still involved at this stage, or after we issue the command to release the snapshot is that us done ? Is it up to vCenter to actually release the snapshot when we instruct it to do so, and then to perform the required disk consolidation. This error is only being seen on the ESX5 environment, but I believe this message is not shown by default in ESX4 but if enabled may well be seen there also.
I see VMware KB articles describing how to clear up the issue if the disk consolidation message is seen, but I don't see anything in our forums or VMware forums regarding what is causing the issue.
Any thoughts ?
AJ
