Acronis® vmProtect™ 7 is the next version of our extremely easy to deploy and use solution built specifically for backup and recovery of VMware vSphere. Version 7 includes many new features such as:
Management from vCenter – in addition to its web-based interface introduced with v6, vmProtect 7 integrates into VMware vSphere Client console so you can backup and recover virtual machines directly from vCenter UI. Choose to use one or both interfaces to perform backup and recovery tasks.
Microsoft Exchange Server Recovery – if you’re already running Microsoft Exchange Server in a virtual environment, vmProtect 7 will be an ideal fit, as it ensures that its image-level VM backup contains a recoverable copy of the Exchange database and handles transaction logs appropriately. It can even recover selected mailboxes, e-mail messages, calendar items, tasks, or contacts from the VM backup, or extract entire .edb database in a consistent state.
Replication – all-in-one product includes both backup and incremental near-continuous replication to a stand-by machine.
Disaster Recovery Plan – are you sure that if disaster strikes, someone who knows how to recover lost data will be available and knows exactly what to do? An automatically generated Disaster Recovery Plan document provides detailed step-by-step recovery instructions that even a novice can follow.
ESXi Bare Metal Recovery – protecting virtual machine is only part of the story. vmProtect 7 is the first product that offers live backup of ESXi host itself, with ability to recovery to a bare metal server, even with dissimilar hardware.
Before you install the product, please carefully read the "Installation notes" and "Known issues" sections of this document.
Installation notes
Before installation of Acronis vmProtect 7 Update 2 please uninstall Acronis vmProtect 7 Beta (4339 build). Update of Beta build is not supported.
The default login to Acronis vmProtect 7 Virtual Appliance has been changed to ‘admin’. This login will be changed automatically when you update from Acronis vmProtect 6.0 (the old login is ‘root’).
Login from web browser into Virtual Appliance interface will be performed automatically with default credentials (admin/root), so you don’t have to provide login password in case you haven’t changed the password for Virtual Appliance.
List of changes (in comparison with Acronis vmProtect 7 build 5155)
Common:
Fixed ability to specify custom port when registering ESX(i) host or a vCenter (now it is possible to specify [IP]:[Port] when configuring vCenter/ESX(i) host connection)
Fixed logs appearance when the new logs were shown in the web console with significant delay
Fixed time offset in the e-mail notification header which was incorrectly calculated
Fixed handling of localized names of the virtual drives (backup, restore, unmount and save)
Fixed time zones selection in Virtual Appliance
Backup/restore
Fixed "Failed to execute IO operation 'Open'" "VMware_VDDK: The file is already in use" warning which may appear in the backup log after backup of Linux-based VM. This particular warning has been converted to information type of message since it does not affect the backup or restore ability or health of the backed up VM.
Fixed "Failed to detect GRUB loader" warning which may appear in the backup log after backup of Linux-based VM (some specific Solaris and Ubuntu editions)
Fixed "Failed to execute IO operation 'Open'" "VMware_VDDK: One of the parameters was invalid" warning which may appear in the backup log after backup of Linux-based VM or a GPT-based VM
Fixed "Failed to download" error which appears when trying to back up a VM which resides under Datacenter which is included in a folder in vCenter
Fixed "Failed to execute IO operation 'Open'" "VMware_VDDK: The server refused connection" warning which may appear in the backup log after backup or after recovery of a VM
Fixed improper disks state after failure of hot-add backup (before if the backup process crashes then it was not possible to resume from this state without reboot of VA)
Fixed a crash of the backup daemon which could appear after failure of 1 VM in a group backup task (where more than 1 VMs are backed up)
Fixed timeout failure "'CreateSnapshot' has failed. Reason: Response timed out." when backing up a VM which snapshot takes a long time to complete
Fixed "Failed to add the network adapter" warning which appeared after backup and restore if the virtual network contains "_" sign in its name
Exchange support
Fixed recovery of mailboxes from Exchange 2010 SP1+ (only SP1 and newer versions are affected). Previously the mailboxes might be empty after the recovery.
Fixed handling of localized names of the virtual drives. Exchange items restore now works even if VM contains non-ASCII symbols in .vmdk file name.
Known issues
Common:
Bootable media (used for P2V and ESXi configuration recovery): ‘smbfs’ protocol is no longer supported for network shares access. If you store archives on NAS devices (or other Linux-based shares) make sure that they support ‘cifs’ protocol for data access. This is the current by-design behavior.
Web console
The backup tasks progress shown in vSphere Client (“Management from vCenter” feature) may differ from the progress in the Web Console due to presence of archive validation activity which is not counted in task progress shown in vSphere.
The web console in Internet Explorer 8.0 may not be opened properly (opens just a grey background) if security for this zone (Internet/Intranet) is set to High level. You should either set security level to Medium or use other browser (IE 9.0, Mozilla Firefox, etc.)
Backup/restore
After recovery to new VM the VM OS version (seen in vSphere client) may be changed from original to improper (for example the OS type was “Windows 7 64 bit” and after recovery it may become “Other 32”). This may happen due to improper recognition of the OS inside the backup.
Virtual Machines which have Linux guest OS inside based on LVM volumes are backed up in sector-by-sector mode, which means that recovery of this VM will allocate the whole size of the virtual disk (even if it was of thin-provisioning type). Files/folders recovery from such archives is not possible. This is the by-design behavior.
Recovery of VMs which have Linux guest OS inside (typically this issue will occur with LVM-based VMs) may result in “Failed to patch Linux OS to restore its bootability.” warning. This warning can be safely ignored since the VM will still be bootable. The warning appears while trying to parse the boot sector of Linux system which is not possible for LVM-based machines and therefore the recovery is done “as is” (which means that patching the bootability is not necessary).
When restoring an archive created by Acronis Backup and Recovery 10/11 there will be unexpected warning messages in the recovery log file. The restored VM will be still bootable and valid, so the issue is only in incorrect messages in the log file.
Exchange-aware backup is not possible on Windows 2003 SBS edition without additional adjustments. By default, the Setup program for Microsoft Windows Small Business Server 2003 turns off the Microsoft Exchange Server 2003 writer for the Volume Shadow Copy service. To protect data using Acronis vmProtect 7, the Exchange 2003 writer must be turned on: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb795725.aspx. For Exchange 2007/2010 versions the VSS writer is turned on by default, so these versions are not affected by this issue. This is a by-design behavior.
File recovery
The sorting by filename in the 2nd step of the File recovery wizard (Explore Recovery Point) is case-sensitive
Exchange support
The following types and properties of Exchange items are not supported and therefore are not shown when browsing through Exchange database during recovery:
“RSS feeds”
“Sync issues”
Exchange VMs hosted on ESX(i) 4.0 are not available for selection and for Exchange-aware backup due to specific limitations of VSS support. Only 4.1 and 5.0 versions are supported for Exchange-aware backups. This is a “by design” behavior.
The generated self-extractible archive cannot be opened once it becomes larger than 2Gb and therefore it is split into 2GB chunks automatically. This is a “by design” behavior
Replication
The replica creation on the datastore which does not have enough free space may hang for a long time instead of failing. This is caused by an issue in VixDiskLib VMWare API which does not return proper error message when trying to write data while there is insufficient space (the “success” is returned instead).
After the replica VM is deleted from vmProtect Web Console, there will be folder on the datastore left which contains test_meta.info file (it contains meta information about the replica VM). It is safe to delete this folder manually from the datastore.