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#1 2021-06-15 11:25:42

mvfid
Member
Registered: 2021-03-06
Posts: 26

vmdk not found, but it's there. Backups seem to be stuck (solved)

On one of my ESXi's (5.1.0) the first backup, gave the following error (xsibackup 1.5.0.8):

Error code 3649 at file xsibackup.c, line 3649 | Error description: error detecting .vmdk file

I did a ls -l on that same filepath and I got results just fine.
The VM is in suspended state.
The VM has 3 vmdk files attached, each on a different storage, the other 2 were backed up ok.

For over 1 hour now it's sitting in the following state:

   21/21                                 XXXX.vmdk        486.00 B     | Done  44.76%
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Total size:                                                                     76.17 GB    | Done 100.00%
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Not sure if this is related to the error above or not.

I do have another esxi which is also doing backups during this time. That one seems to be progressing ok (also running 1.5.0.8) I assume this shouldn't have any impact but I'm putting it out there in case it does: the backed up VMs are different, but they do backup to the same place. This was working fine previously with 1.4 (both doing backups at the same time to the same NAS folder). And I am using the same scripts on both sides, so nothing changed from that POV, just the upgrade from 1.4 to 1.5.

Any ideas what may cause this issue? Maybe where to look to see what it's doing? And what I can do about it?
Safe to kill it and re-try the backup?
If I kill it, will that result in some garbage that I should manually cleanup?

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#2 2021-06-15 14:06:39

mvfid
Member
Registered: 2021-03-06
Posts: 26

Re: vmdk not found, but it's there. Backups seem to be stuck (solved)

Well, I had to start work and the VM in question is my main dev VM. I resumed it and it started up just fine. The disk in question is usable so no idea why the backup errored.

The backup is still in that "waiting" state, nothing changed there.

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#3 2021-06-15 14:25:25

admin
Administrator
Registered: 2017-04-21
Posts: 2,055

Re: vmdk not found, but it's there. Backups seem to be stuck (solved)

Use this script to kill any ghost processes. The below script will look for any process containing the string "xsi" and kill it.

P="$( ps -c | grep xsi | awk '{print $1}' )";for p in $P;do kill -9 $p;done

Just discard any backup that you can't trust. If it's a replica delete it or rename the folder.
If it's a backup to a deduplicated repository, you may just delete the backup folder, this will maybe keep some useless blocks (some MB), that's the only side effect.
You may very well just keep it there, the reason for removing the backup folder is to avoid believing it's OK in the future, you may also rename the folder to YYYMMDDhhmmss.bad to mark it as a bad backup.

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#4 2021-06-15 14:35:34

mvfid
Member
Registered: 2021-03-06
Posts: 26

Re: vmdk not found, but it's there. Backups seem to be stuck (solved)

Thanks. Renaming to bad sounds reasonable. I will retry the backup tomorrow.
Thank you.

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#5 2021-06-16 11:49:17

mvfid
Member
Registered: 2021-03-06
Posts: 26

Re: vmdk not found, but it's there. Backups seem to be stuck (solved)

The same thing happened today as well. The log file contains just the one line with " error detecting .vmdk file".
Is there a way to enable some debug logging to figure out what's wrong? I powered up the VM yesterday and worked like 5 hours on it, so the disk seem to be ok.
On the other hand, if the underlying SSD is starting to fail and that is the root cause of this, I'd like to know.

In case it matters, I'm doing a backup to a deduplicated synology nas. Would the backups be ok if I switch back to 1.14? And are they compatible? As in later on if I were to restore with 1.5 or newer, will the ones made by 1.14 be usable?

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#6 2021-06-18 08:21:00

admin
Administrator
Registered: 2017-04-21
Posts: 2,055

Re: vmdk not found, but it's there. Backups seem to be stuck (solved)

Yours is an issue detecting the physical location of your .vmdk disk.
You may post the output of the following commands to try to determine the reason.

vim-cmd vmsvc/getallvms
readlink /vmfs/volumes/YOUR-DATASTORE
esxcli storage vmfs extent list

Replace YOUR-DATASTORE by the name of the DS where your VM is.

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#7 2021-06-19 08:35:02

admin
Administrator
Registered: 2017-04-21
Posts: 2,055

Re: vmdk not found, but it's there. Backups seem to be stuck (solved)

This is due to a limitation in regards to NFS based disks, already fixed in 1.5.0.9

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