One of the problems with using tiered storage used to be that when a VM with disks on different datastores was Storage vMotioned, the disks would end up on a single datastore.
The simple solution to this is to use the ‘Advanced’ option when using Storage vMotion. It allows you to granularly control where each of the VMs hard disks and configuration files go.
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Sometimes, creating a snapshot – either manually or by using a program like VMWare Data Recovery or Veeam, you might run into issues with the guest OS freezing.
Check to see if, in the event log you see errors or, in some cases just information messages, from source LGTO_Sync. This can sometimes only indicate that this service had started and stopped.
It might also just have the following information:
“The description for Event ID ( 1 ) in Source ( LGTO_Sync ) cannot be found. The local computer may not have the necessary registry information or message DLL files to display messages from a remote computer. You may be able to use the /AUXSOURCE= flag to retrieve this description; see Help and Support for details. The following information is part of the event: , Sync Stop done.”
The reason this happens is because the snapshot process is using a legacy snapshot driver to create a quiesced snapshot of the filesystem but the filesystem doesn’t respond in time due to incomplete I/O (reads or writes). The work around to ensure that the server doesn’t hang or crash is to create non quiesced snapshots of the filesystem. This will give you “Crash Consistent” backups – meaning when you recover the server, it will appear as if the server crashed at the moment you took the snapshot. Most enterprise applications (eg Microsoft Exchange or Microsoft SQL) today are fairly crash consistent – meaning, they will not crash and burn but will recovery gracefully in almost all cases.
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Here is a script that can be used in conjuction with a UPS shutdown utility like APC Powerchute to shutdown all VMs and ESX hosts automatically if a power loss has been detected by the UPS. This script is a configure it once and forget it script. It queries the vCenter server for a list of all VMs and ESX hosts and shuts them all down (VMs first and Hosts later).
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VMWare Data Recovery is a good platform that allows you to backup virtual machines running on an ESX platform managed by a vSphere server. It, however, lacks a good reporting module.
Here is a script compiled to generate an email report on the status of jobs (both successful and unsuccessful) and can be run as a cron job.