vSphere 5 Support

[J1mbo]

Great news that Veeam licenses are portable between vSphere and Hyper-V.

[kins]

[merged]

Hi,

I believe that vSphere 5 is out tomorrow and I have a VMware and Veeam installation next week. What is Veeam's stance when it comes to supporting vSphere 5

[Gostev]

As usual, we would have to perform complete testing cycle on the RTM code once it becomes available, and then declare support with or without having to release a product update.

[Lunddahl]

As usual, we would have to perform complete testing cycle on the RTM code once it becomes available, and then declare support with or without having to release a product update.

Gostev, how is testing going...

- Ulrik Lunddahl - Happy Veeam Reseller/Integrator.

[Gostev]

RTM is still not available for download as of right now for all regions. I know it is available, but only for some. Anyway, we are not talking hours or even days here - full regressive testing of all functionality we have will take at least a week.

[McClane]

As far as I can tell from testing, at least replication to a NFS datastore won't work with VCenter 5.0. I have not tested with a standalone ESX and neither with ESXi5.

[Gostev]

Someone who already has standalone ESXi 5 in test lab told me earlier that all basic Veeam functionality seem to work fine. I am guessing that the issue may indeed be due to vCenter 5.0. Anyway, let's not speculate - better wait for official results from our QC once they complete the required testing.

I would also ask not to bump this thread with individual experiences until you hear official vSphere 5 support statement from us, because even if it works in one situation in specific deployment, it may still not work in other deployments because of some differences. Many people do not read posts carefully, so some may get wrong impression that everything works fine, upgrade production to vSphere 5, and then get all kinds of issues.

[hdejongh]

Gostev,

Are we talking here in general about all your products. We want to upgrade to vsphere 5.0 and only work with veeam monitoring.

Regards

[foggy]

Obviously, all product line needs to be thoroughly tested on the new platform.

[raphael@schitz.net]

I migrated my lab from vsphere 4.1 to vsphere 5 yesterday (no virtual hardware 8 upgrade nor vmtools yet) and the nightly backup job (leveraging SAN mode over iSCSI and CBT) runned just fine. Thank you veeam team !

[trichert]

I don't know about you guys but we are very excited about VS5, no more (realistically) limits on vmfs size this is huge in itself! Up to 32 virtual cpu's? My SQL servers performance is going to go through the roof.

To those of you talking about going to HyperV .. well good luck there is a reason the industry hasn't really adobted it yet, have fun planning an outage every time you want to move VM's from one host to an other, and good luck getting anywhere near the same density on the no over commit memory platform.

[Gostev]

OK, I understand that some of you might be passionate about particular virtualization vendor, but please let's use facts and not emotions.
1. Not adopted by industry? Hyper-V adoption rate is very decent (no matter what analyst report you look at - even at Veeam's own vIndex), moreover in certain countries and certain industries it beats VMware hands down (was surprised to learn this myself). Think LATAM and BRIC countries...
2. Outage during VM migrations? Hyper-V does support moving VMs from one host to another without downtime (Live Migration). Works perfect!
3. VM density level differences between VMware and Hyper definitely cannot be referred to as "anywhere near" these days, with Hyper-V R2 Dynamic Memory, and ASLR hitting hard on VMware TPS performance.

That said, there is no doubt VMware is the technology leader, and Microsoft has a long way to go to match it on technology side. However, there is also such thing as "good enough", especially in SMB. Plus, Microsoft has its own technical, and especially business benefits that needs to be considered (such as unlimited Windows guest licensed with certaing Windows Server editions).

So, by far, it's not all black and white.

[Bunce]

Added to that, you now effectively have to pay for the memory you overcommit with vram.

[gerdawg]

and good luck getting anywhere near the same density on the no over commit memory platform.

This is the thing that burns me most about VMware and their new pricing strategy's. They pushed and touted for years on end many to one consolidation ratio's and how much it will save your company money only to release a product with a minimal set of enticing features for quite a dime more. With this greedy move VMware effectively pushed more users to give a hard look at using Hyper-V or even Xen - I know we are. In fact the only thing that would be holding our servers back from achieving near 11:1 ratios is RAM at this point as we don't' have many CPU intensive applications. Given the new licensing requirements we've easily doubled our initial investment outlay for subsequent licensing of vSphere 5 - It's going to be a hard sell to justify these new costs. I foresee we'll be on V4.1 until it expires and then will give a hard look at what's available at that time. For what we need now v4.1 is more than enough.

The bottom line and fact of the matter is adopters of VMware are now being monetarily penalized for taking advantage of a product that enticed you in the first place to create high consolidation ratios, only to hook you and charge you later for it. That alone makes me want to switch. I'm sure some users of the new licensing model might make out, however I can guarantee most of us likely won't fall into that category and this is exactly what VMware is hoping for.

So I for one am very excited about Veeam's commitment to Hyper-V...especially if VMware sticks to their guns about their licensing policy and decides to go the way of Novell. This was a smart move for Veeam all the way around and it gives us as users of their product a way out when management looks and laughs at how much it's going to cost them to remain on VMware over Hyper-v.

[J1mbo]

I appreciate this is somewhat off-topic, but is NFS a supported storage option for Hyper-V?

[gerdawg]

It is not:

Here is a good technet thread on it:
http://social.technet.microsoft.com/For ... e33fe0511c

I believe you are limited to some form of iSCSI/FC or samba setup for Hyper-V to be supported.

[Gostev]

OK, back to the main topic. As promised, here is an update on vSphere 5 RTM code compatibility for Veeam Backup & Replication 5.0.2

Our QC has found the following incompatibilities:
• Incremental replication passes to ESXi 5 target fail (initial pass works normally).
• Backup in direct SAN access mode will fail for VM disks on VMFS5 volumes.
• SureBackup is not functional when ESXi 5 is used to host the virtual lab.
• Multi-OS FLR is not functional when ESXi 5 is used to run the FLR helper virtual appliance.
• vCenter Server 5.0 causes job to fails with the "Inactive datastore" error. Jobs on standalone ESXi 5 hosts do not seem to be affected by the issue, but all jobs configured through the vCenter Server 5.0 connection are.

At a first sight, all issues are easy to fix. We plan to make the hotfix addressing all of the issues above available through support in about 2 weeks. I will update this topic once the hotfix is available.

Thanks!

[digitlman]

This is why we always wait a month or three after a new version of software for the kinks to get worked out.

Will this delay v6? Is it still looking at a Q42011 release?

[DAPBENJAMIN]

Hi,

I am seeing exactly the same problems as Gostev! I hope they are fixed soon!

Regards,

Darren

[Gostev]

This is why we always wait a month or three after a new version of software for the kinks to get worked out.

Yep, always a good thing to wait until dust settles with the new major release when talking about core platform. In fact, I know that most of our larger customers typically validate the new hypervisor code in test lab for months (!) before going ahead with production use. Remember that earlier VMware service pack release when VMs would not start up after being shut down? This caused "production down" all over the world for customers who had jumped the gun... no guarantees something like this will never happens again.

First ESXi 5 patch was announced on the same day when vSphere 5 went GA... enough said. And it is not some issue with VMware, it's in the nature of software development. Microsoft "SP1 rule" is there as well most people prefer not do deploy major releases until SP1 is out.

Will this delay v6? Is it still looking at a Q42011 release?

Only slightly (some extra R&D and QC time is needed, but not much since we need to fix these issues in v6 anyway). Definitely still Q4 2011 release for v6, and more like the middle of Q4, than the end.

[flakpyro]

OK, back to the main topic. As promised, here is an update on vSphere 5 RTM code compatibility for Veeam Backup & Replication 5.0.2

Our QC has found the following incompatibilities:
• Incremental replication passes to ESXi 5 target fail (initial pass works normally).
• Backup in direct SAN access mode will fail for VM disks on VMFS5 volumes.
• SureBackup is not functional when ESXi 5 is used to host the virtual lab.
• Multi-OS FLR is not functional when ESXi 5 is used to run the FLR helper virtual appliance.
• vCenter Server 5.0 causes job to fails with the "Inactive datastore" error. Jobs on standalone ESXi 5 hosts do not seem to be affected by the issue, but all jobs configured through the vCenter Server 5.0 connection are.

At a first sight, all issues are easy to fix. We plan to make the hotfix addressing all of the issues above available through support in about 2 weeks. I will update this topic once the hotfix is available.

Thanks!

Very strange, in our testing here we have been able to backup via vCenter 5.0 as long as the volume is VMFS3, VMFS5 volumes fail. (This is via SAN mode.)

In Hot Add mode backing up via the ESXi host directly fails but backing up via vCenter 5.0 works as expected, once again as long as the Volume is VMFS3.

VMware tools quince is disabled as well.

[ThomasMc]

Bit OT here but since this is the first major release that VMware has done since we have been virtualizing is it normal to just upgrade as they release it? I would have thought people would want to test for a good couple of months before deploying 5.

[AlexWhit]

is there an update when the hotfix will be out? i am wanting to upgrade to ESXi 5 for the USB3 option.

thanks

[Gostev]

Reading through my post above, hotfix development should take about 2 weeks. I will provide an update at the end of the next week. Thanks!

[nicko82]

Any update on the hotfix, I would like to start testing this ASAP?

[dionrowney]

Reading through my post above, hotfix development should take about 2 weeks. I will provide an update at the end of the next week. Thanks!

My calendaring math skills say "end of the next week" = Sept 23.

[RHofland]

Waiting for this hotfix, my test environment wants to be backup'd.

[nicko82]

Waiting for this hotfix, my test environment wants to be backup'd.

Actually the backup component works fine with vSphere 5, its only replication that doesn't work for me.

[agentduke]

I see a lot of criticism floating about upgrading to vSphere5 from vSphere 4.1. It should be noted that many people are forced to do this by VMWare themselves. For products under support, they provide a limited window in which to upgrade the product for free. However, they stipulate that you must immediately discontinue use of your previous key in conjunction with the upgrade.

So while many see fit to 'fault' their peers for early adoption, not all of this is their fault. A great many are being forced to do this by VMWare themselves. VMWare is interested in adoption....they really don't care that Veeam doesn't work yet. Just thought I'd point that out so we can get past some of that criticism and onto a fix. Those of us in the middle-ground, who are testing this in a lab, have the luxury of testing without such pressure.

[chrmol]

Could we be lucky to see any hotfix today?
(It would be nice to spend the weekend on my home lab env.)