Hotadd fails with storage policies

[lwarner]

Ref case 05435549
When doing standard replication or CDP, VMs that use custom storage policies will choose nbd rather than hotadd.

Support said they would file this as a bug, and it would be fixed in VBR12. It's very frustrating right now because I've been waiting for months, and heard nothing.

When can we expected VBR 12 to be released? Meanwhile, I can't get my VM initial replications to succeed when all I can get is 7MB/s due to slow nbd performance.

[HannesK]

Hello,
the NBD issue had to be fixed on the VMware side first. It looks like, that happened recently and we plan to add the updated VMware library to V12, yes.

This is current status of V12 release. If custom storage policies are the reason, maybe it's possible to avoid them temporarily?

Best regards,
Hannes

[HannesK]

Hello,
in my answer above, I talk about fixing NBD performance issues. But using NBD is not the real cause of the problem.

On 23rd May, you mention a VMware ticket number where VMware says, that they plan to fix something... can you maybe share the VMware bug number / KB article with us?

Thanks,
Hannes

[lwarner]

Hi Hannes,
The VMware ticket was 21283089512. The bug was directly related to storage policies. Briefly, the issue was:

When a VM has disks on both VSAN datastore and traditional datastore;
and the traditional store uses a disk encryption policy, which requires that the VM Home policy match the traditional store policy;
the VM Home policy would not be correctly saved, and would revert to the Default storage policy.

This caused a storage policy error, which resulted in some local issue (e.g. can't change disk size), and also prevented CDP from working, as CDP could not set the correct policies on the target.

The bug was within vCenter only. VMware provided a custom hotfix for our company on 8-19. The patch did resolve the storage policy issue, and now we can successfully run CDP jobs with mixed policy VMs. However, it did not resolve this specific NBD issue.
VMware said that the fix will be included in 7.0U3 Patch 06, although I can't seem to find the relation between "Patch xx" and the typical published version numbers (7.0 U3x, etc.). Support did not reference any KB.

Thanks,
Leigh

[HannesK]

Hello,
if I got it right, then the Veeam case was closed on 7th June and the VMware hotfix is from 19th August.

So the Veeam support could not investigate, why the failover to NBD really happens, because there was an issue on the VMware side. My suggestion would be, to ask Veeam support in a new case, why the failover to NBD happens. The alternative is to live with NBD and wait for V12.

Best regards,
Hannes