NFC storage connections

[Peejay62]

Hi,

though not the preferred method, we use NBD for some backups. Due to a problem on some of our esx machines (faulty / buggy firmware causing NFC storage connections to become unavailable) NBD backups fail. I have tried switching over to hotadd by assigning a proxy to the job capable of hotadd. The hotadd job also fails with the NFC connection. I am not able to switch over to SAN mode, so I cannot try if that works. I wonder, is the NFC connection needed anyway, no matter the transport mode? I guess it's being used to pull in the vmx file? Is there a way to bypass setting up that NFC connection (at least in hotadd mode (or san)) and make a backup. I know the problem is not caused by Veeam, but Veeam suffers of it. Right now I am unable te take backups of the machines running on those faulty machines. My sla's are under heavy pressure right now..
Any suggestions are welcome,

Thanks, Peter

[chrisdearden]

Hi Peter,
NFC connection will always be used to grab the VM metadata ( VMX files etc ) - no matter what you use for the transport of the VMDK blocks.

[Peejay62]

Hi Chris,

ok, suspected that. We have a kind of SPOF here then.. I am experiencing it right now, unable to backup some machines. There should be an alternative way to grab the metadata i wish..

[chrisdearden]

the problem is that you can't hotadd a VMX file & VADP wont allow us to grab the VMX files via direct SAN. The ammount of traffic we pull over NFC for the metadata is pretty small -are you not able to browse the datastores / download files from those hosts? that uses the same protocol.

[Peejay62]

No Chris, I cannot download anything from the datastore..