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aht-canderson

Member

Registered: 2017-06-27

Posts: 1

DRS Cluster Compatibility

We are using XSIBackup Pro with a VMWare ESXi 6.5 cluster of about 12 servers. Is there a way to have XSIBackup detect which host the VM to backup is currently on?

We have set it up to backup all running VMs to test it out, but I have noticed that sometimes XSIBackup will fail and exit (with no e-mail) when it tries to back up a VM that DRS has migrated off since the backup process was started.

Do you have any recommendations for when DRS load balancing is in use on a cluster of ESXi hosts?

roberto

Moderator

Registered: 2017-04-22

Posts: 49

Re: DRS Cluster Compatibility

You have different approaches to solve this situation:

- Create Affinity Rules to prevent VMs from migrating while being backed up

- Disable the vMotion VMkernel interface

This URL covers the topic in detail:
Disable DRS

Disabling the vMotion interface before the backup job and enabling it again once it finishes is probably something to take on account.

The nitty gritty details:

To disable DRS for Virtual Machine Kernel port:

- List IPv4/6 ports: esxcli network ip interface ipv4/6 get

Once we have the port names, we can enable/disable them as needed.

vim-cmd hostsvc/vmotion/vnic_set [vnic] 
vim-cmd hostsvc/vmotion/vnic_set vmk0
Disabling vMotion Port:
vim-cmd hostsvc/vmotion/vnic_unset [vnic]
vim-cmd hostsvc/vmotion/vnic_unset vmk0

admin

Administrator

Registered: 2017-04-21

Posts: 2,057

Re: DRS Cluster Compatibility

We have included a new argument in XSIBACKUP-PRO 10: --disable-vmotion that will disable the vmotion bind and re-enable it when the backup has completed. This will prevent the VMs at the host from being moved around while the backup is in progress.