V11 Community edition support restore?

[iamlouyo]

Client presently running V10. I installed V11 in a W10 system to have a look, didn't bother with trial license so have community edition. Does backups but won't restore. Is this a limitation? I opened case # 04699844 but thought it may just be a restriction. ESXi 7.0 U1, 2 different systems.

[foggy]

Hi Lou, could you please clarify the "Does backups but won't restore" statements? What kind of backups and restore are you trying to perform and what do you get as a result? Also, please note that vSphere 7.0 U2 is not yet officially supported by v11.

[iamlouyo]

Sorry I wasn't more specific. I am assuming that I am doing something wrong. I have 2 ESXi servers, version 7 U1 (not U2). Both do the same thing, from 2 different W10 machines running V11. I did a V11 backup of 2 VM's, one Windows Server 2012 and one Windows Server 2016. I then tried to do a Volume restore and also a VM restore. Both hung after starting the restore. Usually did 1 Meg of the 100 Gig restore occasionally as much as 300 Meg. I then used V11 to try to restore the same backups made previously with V10. Failed the same way. Those work fine with V10. The logs show nothing because there was no error. One time, I left it for about an hour while doing something else. 1 meg restored. When I tried to do a volume on top of the existing one, it wrote about 200 Meg corrupting the existing one. I find it very hard to believe that what I am seeing is happening elsewhere, thinking I haven't enabled something. I have a knack for that.
Lou

[foggy]

Yep, looks totally unexpected, let's see what our engineers say after reviewing the setup and (if required) the log files closer.

[iamlouyo]

OK, I have concluded my testing. I suspect my environment is the contributor but don't know for sure.
Fix is to stay with V10 for now.
The details:
I don't have any Windows systems here.
I run Linux LMDE 4
I run VMWare Workstation 16
I have 2 main Windows 10 VM's and install servers and such temporarily as needed.
I installed V10 in one and V11 in the other for testing.
I also have a Dell workstation running ESXi (now V 7.0 U1). I use this for testing and for Surveillance cameras (W10 system), I get the same results restoring to it.
I do backups to a Linux data drive via vmware-host
Network adapters are bridged.

For further testing of V11, I created a Kali linux VM on the new Dell server I am provisioning with ESXi 7.0 U1
Backed up with V10 to the drive on the Linux host.
With V10, a restore takes 0.02:35. Kali is restored and boots.
With V11, restore does not complete, for this test I let it run for almost 5 minutes, it restored 1 MB. When I cancelled, the VM was destroyed, error in Grub.
On a hunch, I copied the backup file from the Linux host to the Windows VM and reran the restore.
This time, it completed the restore in about 17 minutes, 10MB/s.
I then did a V11 backup, same Kali VM, to the Windows VM drive. Ran fine, about 100 MB/s.
Restoring from that backup also takes 17 minutes.
In previous tests, I had waited as much as an hour, still at 1MB.
Apologize if I have wasted your time.

[Gostev]

This sounds like a known issue #2 from the V11 sticky in the main forum.