VM Direct Engine limitations and unsupported features
Review the following limitations and unsupported features related to the
VM Direct Engine.
Backup of individual folders within a virtual machine is not supported
PowerProtect Data Manager only supports image-level backup and disk-level backup. You cannot perform backups of individual folders within the virtual machine.
Backups fail for resource pools recreated with the same name as deleted pool
When you delete a resource pool in vCenter and then recreate a resource pool with the same name, backups fail. Re-configure the protection group with the newly created resource pool.
Datastore names cannot contain special characters
Using special characters in datastore names can cause problems with the
VM Direct Engine, such as failed backups and restores. Special characters include the following:
% & * $ # @ ! \ / : * ? " < > | ;, and so on.
DD Boost over fibre channel not supported
PowerProtect Data Manager does not support DD Boost over fibre channel (DFC).
Error when changing configuration of many virtual machines at the same time
When configuring or unconfiguring many virtual machines (300 or more) in a protection policy, an error message might display indicating that the request is too large. You can click
OK and proceed, but system performance will be impacted due to the size of the request. As a best practice, it is recommended to use protection rules to automatically determine which assets are assigned to protection policies when the assets are discovered.
Hot Add backups fail when datacenter names contain special characters
Virtual machine backups fail when the datacenter name contains special characters and the transport mode specified for
VM Direct backups is
Hot Add only. Avoid using special characters in the datacenter name, for example, "Datacenter_#2@3", or specify
Hotadd with fallback to Network Block Device for the transport mode.
Hot Add backups fail when virtual machine protection policy configured with Virtual Flash Read Cache value
When using
Hot Add transport mode for a virtual machine protection policy, the backup fails with the following error if configured with the Virtual Flash Read Cache (vFRC) value:
"Backup has FAILED. Failed to backup
virtual disk \"Hard disk <no.>\". Failed to initialize Block
Reader. Failed to open source VMDK \<dataStore
name>/<VM_Name.vmdk>\": VDDK Error: 13: You do not have
access rights to this file. (500)".
I/O contention when all Virtual Machines on a single data store
I/O contention may occur during snapshot creation and backup read operations when all Virtual Machines reside on a single datastore.
Limitations to SQL Server application consistent data protection
Review the SQL Server application-consistent protection support limitations in the section "Microsoft application agent for SQL Server application-aware protection" of the
PowerProtect Data Manager for Microsoft Application Agent SQL Server User Guide.
Network configuration settings are not restored with virtual machine after recovery of a vApp backup
Network configuration settings are not backed up with the virtual machine as part of a vApp backup. As a result, when you restore a vApp backup, you must manually reconfigure the network settings.
NFC log level settings
To assist with I/O performance analysis, set the NFC log level in the
VM Direct proxy configuration file to its highest value, for example,
vixDiskLib.nfc.LogLevel=4. Setting the log level in the server for NFC asynchronous I/O is not required. You can then run the VDDK sample code and evaluate I/O performance by examining the
vddk.log and the
vpxa log file.
NOTE Virtual Machines with very high I/O might stall during consolidation due to the ESXi forced operation called synchronous consolidate. Plan your backups of such Virtual Machines according to the amount of workload on the Virtual Machine.
Protection fails for virtual machine name containing { or }
A
PowerProtect Data Manager virtual machine protection policy fails to back up virtual machines that contain the special characters
{ or
} in the name. This limitation exists with vSphere versions previous to 6.7. If you do not have vSphere 6.7 or later installed, avoid using these two characters in virtual machine names.
SAN transport mode not supported
PowerProtect Data Manager supports only the Hot Add and NBD transport modes. The Hot Add mode is the default transport mode. For a protection policy, you can specify to use only Hot Add mode, only NBD mode, or Hot Add mode with fallback to NBD of Hot Add is not available.
Specify NBD for datastores if
VM Direct should use NBD mode only
For a
VM Direct Engine that will only use NBD transport mode, you must also specify the datastores for which you want the proxy to perform only NBD backups to ensure that any backups of virtual machines running on these datastores are always performed using NBD mode. This also ensures that the same NBD-only proxies are never used for backups of virtual machines residing on any other datastores.
Thin provisioning not preserved during NFS datastore recovery
When backing up thin-provisioned virtual machines or disks for virtual machines on NFS datastores, an NFS datastore recovery does not preserve thin provisioning. VMware knowledge base article 2137818 at
https://kb.vmware.com/kb/2137818 provides more information.
Virtual machine alert "VM MAC conflict" may appear after successful recovery of virtual machine
After performing a successful recovery of a virtual machine through vCenter version 6, an alert may appear indicating a "VM MAC conflict" for the recovered virtual machine, even though the new virtual machine will have a different and unique MAC address. You must manually acknowledge the alert or clear the alert after resolving the MAC address conflict. Note that this alert can be triggered even when the MAC address conflict is resolved.
VM Direct Engine configuration settings cannot be modified after adding the
VM Direct Engine
After adding a
VM Direct Engine, the only field you can modify is the
Transport Mode. Any other configuration changes require you to delete and then re-add the
VM Direct Engine.
Additional VM Direct actions provides more information.
VM Direct Engine configured with dual stack is not supported
The
VM Direct Engine does not support dual stack (IPv4 and IPv6) addressing. If you want to run backups and restores using the
VM Direct Engine, use IPv4 only addressing.
VMware Distributed Resource Scheduler cluster support limitations
The
PowerProtect Data Manager server is supported in a VMware Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS) cluster, with the following considerations:
During backup of a virtual machine,
host-vmotion or
storage-vmotion is not permitted on the virtual machine. The option to migrate will be disabled in the
vSphere Client UI.
If the
VM Direct proxy is in use for a backup or restore with
Hot Add disks attached, then
storage-vmotion of the vProxy is not permitted during these operations.