Restoring to a VMware storage cluster - hotadd

[neilmacneil]

Hello,

I ran into a possible issue today while restoring a VM. In the "Full VM Restore Wizard" I selected "restore to a new location" and selected the hotadd proxy. When selecting the datastore, Veeam detects it is on "datastore-2", I change this to the datastore cluster "datastore-cluster" which it was living on originally. This is all fine up until the restore starts. Veeam uses NBD instead of hotadd if I restore to a datastore cluster (even though nbd failover is not checked off). If I leave it on datastore-2 it will then restore using hotadd.

Is this expected behavior? I will open a support case if not.

Thanks,

-Neil

[Gostev]

Hi, Neil.

Depending on what actual datastore within the datastore cluster is automatically picked when you select "datastore-cluster", it may be normal (for example, if your proxy cannot hot add disks on the picked datastore).

Thanks!

P.S. I removed debug logs snippets as perform forum rules.

[spiritie]

@Gostev I can confirm same behaviour is present on latest build of v11 as OP describes it.

In a environment for one our customers all backups are hot-add every night perfectly. All ESXi hosts have access to all Datastores and all Veeam Proxies have access to all Hosts & Datastores.

I was really confused when restoring a VM and Veeam suddenly picked NBD mode for the restore operation. I then tried a few different stuff and figured out if I picked a specific Datastore under the Datastore Cluster then hot-add works every time. Everytime I pick the Datastore Cluster, NBD mode was chosen again.

The VM.<VM_name>.Restore.log quickly shows what goes wrong in the scenario where a Datastore Cluster is chosen:
<01> Info [ProxyDetector] Searching for VMFS LUN and volumes of the following datastores: ['']

Running a restore with a specific Datastore as restore target the [""] is populated correctly with the chosen datastore.

All these years, Neil was right

[foggy]

Hi Gert, thanks for posting into the existing thread. Are you positive that every time the restore process used NBD mode did the proxy involved have access to the corresponding datastore for hotadd? Let me check internally, please.

[spiritie]

Hi @foggy

100% sure. All Proxies have access to all Datastores, it's a very small environment. I've done 7 restores, constantly everytime I choose the Clustered Datastore it used NBD, and choosing a specific Datastore within the Cluster then it uses hot-add. I just verified all my restore sessions in the Veeam console.

To exclude that is was something with that specific environment, I went ahead and tested it on a completely different environment, same behaviour.

[foggy]

This was confirmed internally as an issue - hotadd is not detected upon restore to Datastore Cluster. Will be addressed in one of the following Veeam B&R updates - thanks for the heads up!