Instant Recovery doesn't work (invalid datastore path)

[marine]

To the mods, please leave this post here so someone from the community can help me. You removed my initial post 3 days ago and told me to contact support. They have been very unresponsive and not been able to solve my problem. I have sent them logs, screen shots and detailed information. But I have gone too long without a solution. The purpose of an online forum is to help each other out so please leave this post in place in hopes that someone knows how to fix this. I have not been impressed with Veeam support at all.

My problem is pretty simple... I simply cannot get Instant Recvovery to work. And I cannot do a File Level Restore from a Linux vm either. It has something to do with the vPowerNFS datastore that Veeam creates for both of these processes. It seems to create the datastore ok on my ESX server but it fails to register the vm's with an error "[01.06.2011 09:44:32] <18> Error Unable to access the virtual machine configuration: Invalid datastore path 'netfs://myserver.domain.local//VeeamBackup_MYSERVER/LinuxTest-Restore_417e4182-4285-406b-9e08-e26a7515b690/LinuxTest.vmx'. (System.IO.FileNotFoundException)"

I can do a backup of any Linux or Windows vm just fine. And I can do a complete restore of these to my original datastore on my san. But I cannot do an Instant Recovery or FLR from a Linux vm. Why does Veeam create a datastore and then say the path is incorrect? I can actually go into my vcenter client and see the datastore that Veeam created. And I can right click on it and browse the datastore. But the weird thing is that I have no idea where the files in that datastore are located. I cannot find them anywhere on my Veeam server. It lists the following files in the datastore...

vpxa-1041.log.gz
vpxa-1049.log
vpxa-1048.log.gz
vpxa-1040.log.gz
vpxa-1047.log.gz
vpxa-1046.log.gz
vpxa-1045.log.gz
vpxa-1044.log.gz
vpxa-1043.log.gz
vpxa-1042.log.gz

When I installed Veeam I chose to use D:\Veeam\NFS as the location to store the vPowerNFS files. And this drive is an iSCSI disk with 8TB of free space. Someone said that you should not use a mapped drive for this but iSCSI devices are seen as physical drives by Windows, not mapped drives. So this should be fine.

Can someone PLEASE point me in the right direction here. It would be greatly appreciated. And for god sakes leave the post here so that someone else can know the solution if they ever run across it. It's bad enough that support cannot solve this for me. But it's a complete slap in the face for mods to remove the post as well!!! This forum should become a knowledge base for others to search through when they are having trouble.

[marine]

By the way, the support case ID is #5133664.

[marine]

First, thanks to the mods for leaving this post here.

Second, I got a Senior System Consultant from Dell involved and they figured it out for me. I'm still not exactly sure why, but I had to change the IP address of my physical Veeam backup server so that it was on the same subnet as the management traffic for my esx hosts. Now everything works fine.

Would be nice to leave this solution here in case someone else is searching for an answer. At least it may point them in the right direction.

[Alexey D.]

I'm still not exactly sure why, but I had to change the IP address of my physical Veeam backup server so that it was on the same subnet as the management traffic for my esx hosts.

Glad you solved the problem!
Most probably, the root cause can be described with these sentences (quote from the sticky F.A.Q.): "... Because VMware ESX(i) uses vmKernel interface to access NFS storage, ESX(i) host you are using for any vPower functionality must have vmKernel interface on the same network as Veeam Backup server."

The error message you were getting was a bit confusing, because usually in case of vmKernel network connectivity misconfiguration users get "mount failed..." statement, not "...invalid datastore path" (there are some existing topics on "mount failed..." error, on this forum).

So, let's keep this thread as it would be useful for someone facing the same situation.