vSphere Data Protection is still too immature

With the release of vSphere 5.1, I was excited to migrate from the sometimes-flaky "VMware Data Recovery" (VDR) product over to the Avamar-based "vSphere Data Protection" (VDP) appliance.

Unfortunately I found the product to be limited and hard to work with, even when compared to VDR.

While VDP replaces VDR in the vSphere lineup, it's no upgrade: VDR is not supported for v5.1 (but will work in many circumstances) and will not be supported for that environment; VDP will not be back-rev'd to older versions of vSphere. However, there is currently no way to "upgrade" or migrate from VDR to VDP; when you migrate to v5.1, you have to essentially "start fresh" with VDP if you desire to use the supported VMware solution. Any organization with backup retention requirements may find this a trouble spot—but then, you should probably be looking at a purpose-built product, anyway.

Installing VDP is both easy and difficult, and is performed in two stages. In the first stage—which is very easy—VDP is installed as an appliance from an OVF. The main decision you must make comes in the form of selecting the appropriate size of appliance to install: 512GB, 1TB or 2TB. This is where reading the manual comes in handy: you'd better pick the correct size, because you can neither expand the repository on an existing appliance, nor can you migrate the data from one appliance to another. This is one place where VDR had better capability: expanding a repository was pretty easy, and you could migrate a repository from one appliance to another. Additionally, the size is representative of the repository for the backups, not the space that is actually consumed by the entire appliance: the manual indicates that the actual space consumed by the appliance will be ~1.5x the stated size of the repository.

Why not just pick the biggest, you ask? Because the appliance will consume all that space, even if you install it on NFS or select thin disks for block storage. It'll start small, but the initialization process for the appliance (which happens as part of the second stage of the installation) will result in every block being touched and the disk being de-thinned. Worse, if you select "eager-zeroed thick" for the disk, the initialization will STILL go through and touch all blocks/clusters, so don't waste your time with it.

After the appliance is loaded and powered-on, you figure out where the admin portal is published, which is then opened in a web browser. The security-minded will cringe at the requirements for the appliance password (set during the second install phase):

• Exactly 9 characters (no more, no less)
• At least one uppercase letter
• At least one lowercase letter
• At least one number
• No special characters

Personally, I have no problem with a minimum of 9 characters, but requiring exactly 9 chars, and not permitting "special characters" really makes me wonder what they're doing.

Other settings are configured (see Duncan Epping's "Back to Basics for VDP" for more details) and depending on your storage performance, it may be an either long or short wait while the system finalizes things and you're able to back up VMs. In my case, I had to redo the install a couple of times, with no rhyme or reason why the install mode wouldn't take the settings the first time.

Once the user interface is available in the Web Client, it's fairly straightforward for a previous VDR user to create VDP jobs that mirror the old system. VDR, however, had far more information about the "goings on" as it interacted with your vSphere environment; you could quickly see which VMs were being backed up at a given time (if at all), and if you had a failure for any reason, one could fairly quickly diagnose the reason for the failure (commonly a snapshot issue) and address the problem.

VDP, on the other hand, gives essentially zero information about machines being protected. Worse, the daily report that VDP can issue will also include information about machines that are not being protected, and there's no way to suppress the information. In my lab, I had 13 VMs to protect, and each day I learned that 2 of them would fail. I struggled to figure out how to determine the VMs with issues, and once I did that, it was nearly impossible to determine what caused the backup to fail. With some patience and Knowledge Base searches, I was able to get an idea of where logfiles might exist, but even once I found them, isolating the logs for the particular VMs of interest was difficult. Of the two failing VMs, one was the vCenter host, which frequently failed to backup in any environment when in-guest VSS snapshots were selected; I never solved that problem because I could never find a cause for the other VM (an Windows SSH host) failed as long as the system was powered on.

Ultimately, I gave up on it, and will be looking at other products like Veeam and Symantec V-Ray. While Avamar may be a phenomenal backup system, this VDP derivative of it is far too immature and unpredictable for me to rely on for my important data: I've uninstalled the appliance and removed the registration from vCenter.