VCB 1.5u2 Restore with vSphere 4.1

[markzz]

We have recently migrated our ESX environment to vSphere 4.1, vCenter 4.1 and are using VCB1.5u2 for primary backup purposes.

Beyond the quiesce issue with vss everything seems fine.

Recently we had need to recover a previously VCBed system.

To my surprise the exporter in vCenter could not import it as it seems VCB is no longer a supported format.

Converter standalone 4.1 buggered things up but Converter standalone 4.0 worked fine.

The onne catch with all Converter Standalone versions is they may import the VCB successfully but they missalign the disks.

I'm sure we are not alone with this issue and am interested in others experiences and how they have dealt with this.

Thank you

Regards

Mark

[vmroyale]

Hello.

This is a known issue and is detailed in kb 1026944. Your solution of using Converter 4.0 is the correct one.

>The onne catch with all Converter Standalone versions is they may import the VCB successfully but they missalign the disks.

Did you see this with version 4.0 of the Converter?

Good Luck!

[Lakshmi_Gayatri]

I could successfully get restore work with Converter 4.0.1 , had not seen the disks being misaligned.

Can you please check with 4.0.1?

[markzz]

I was checking the alignment with vOptimiser trial version. Of course this reports missalignment if the guest isn't 64k aligned.

If you believe restoring VCB's with 4.0.1 converter doesn't misalign the disks would you know what KB does it align to.??

[Lakshmi_Gayatri]

I could not find a KB as such, but I have all SCSI disks, do you have a combination of IDE + SCSI?

[markzz]

No we are running at  SCSI disks also.

Another question then.

If you know your guests disks are aligned how are you showing this.

What tool or method are you using?

[Lakshmi_Gayatri]

I check the VMs after restore manually or sometimes run a script to check the vmx entries. I do not use any tools. When you say the disks are getting misaligned, is it with all VMs?

[markzz]

only VCBed and then restored guests are missaligned.

There are a number of tools available to check your guest disk alignment. If you have not checked all guests you should. In one LAB environment where the disk was heavily loaded we saw a 20% reduction in IO once all guests were aligned.

In production the SAN was not as heavily utilised but regardless we would have seen a significant reduction in IO, this would not have translated to performance improvements as the SAN was not being heavily utilised before alignment.

vOptimiser is a very easy product to use, NetApp have MBRAlign, these are the 2 I know of.

Of course you can check your alignment from msinfo32 on your windows systems.

[Lakshmi_Gayatri]

Thanks  so much, I never knew about vOptimiser, will get started with this.

[Lakshmi_Gayatri]

I had verified some restored VMs yesterday and no disk mis-alignment. Please try with converter 4.0.1 asgiven in http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/microsite.do?cmd=displayKC&docType=kc&externalId=1026944...

Regards

LG