Have to say, VDR is/was a horrific stupid mess. Untill I actually fixed it.
After a couple months of watching my backups fail and then having to remove the backups and start over,
Of watching the vdr appliance's CONSTANT spewing of CIFS errors, I decided I had to man it up a bit, and logged into thier console
(VDR appliance turned out to be running under centos5, why they HELL did they switch to Suse for vdp???)
and did some serious digging into the guts of the thing. After trying various things, I DID eventually get it to behave.
In fact I was able to have problem free backups for the next 8 months, for our entire cluster, (~20 servers) in a single 2 TB datastore.
(Yes, virginia, the reason they say use only 500gb is because they stupidly allow only CIFS)
untill we switched to Acronis vmProtect. (Which is a good product. I do get some errors but mostly with vss)
For those still cursed with a VDR and it's constant failures and BS, I can tell you how to actually FIX vdr.
I have implemented it at several locations now and have had no issues whatsoever with it. Runs much faster as well.
I am sure many people will tell me I know not whereof I speak,
But for those who are still banging thier heads against VDR, Try the following:
1: Go into your VIclient and remove any existing VDR destinations.
2: Set up your backup repository as an NFS share, NOT smb.
(Clear out the almost certainly corrupt backups that will be left behind)
3: Log into the VDR appliance console, default username is root, default password is vmw@re.
4: Issue the following commmand to install the NFS client:
yum install nfs-utils nfs-utils-lib (Internet access required, obviously)
5: Create a mountpoint somewhere, I used /backup1 (mkdir /backup1)
6: Create an fstab entry so that it mounts your NFS to your mountpoint on boot,
So edit the /etc/fstab file using nano(yum install nano), vi, whatever, adding the line:
10.10.10.62:/vmdr /backup1 nfs rsize=8192,wsize=8192,timeo=30,intr
(ServerIP:NFSshare) (Your mount point) (share type) (Options, which may differ according to network)
7: Then reboot the appliance. (I use reboot -f because it takes freaking FOREVER for thier stupid services to stop)
8: Now you may go into your destanations and see the share you just mounted. Run an integrity check. Watch it zip up to 100%.
9: Create backup jobs pointing at it.
Every time I have done this it's like magic, and all of a sudden VDR is not shitty anymore
Why the supposed geniuses at vmware couldn't work this one out, I have no clue. anyone can tell you that NFS>SMB any day anyway.
I never yet posted this mainly because I don't regard it as MY job to fix something THEY charged a LOT of money for.
I believe that if you are thinking you want money, you can write your own damn KB, I ain't doing it for you for free.
I should bill them for fixing thier product, in fact.