If you are considering Vembu BDR solutions for your environment it’s worth going through below points in-order to know what it cannot offer. Usually no other solution will publish such detailed guide on the limitations. But Vembu provides it and these details will help you know the product in more details and help you decide on the solution.
VMware Backup:
1. VMware backup does not support backup of virtual machines with independent disks.
2. Application aware backup is not supported for 32 bit Guest OS.
3. Vembu VMBackup does not support VMware backup for ESXi free versions as VMware APIs themselves do not support ESXi free versions.
4. VMware backup is not supported if the virtual disk resides in RDM datastore.
5. VMware backup is not supported if the Guest OS hardware version is lower than v7.
6. In VMware backups, if any snapshot is reverted, further incremental backups will fail.
7. To use VMware Hot-Add Data Transfer mode , the agent must be installed on the Virtual Machine on the same ESXi server where the source VMs reside.
8. If the proxy VM in which the backup agent is running is on a VFMS3 datastore, the volume on the proxy VM should be formatted with appropriate block size given below, depending on the maximum disk size of the source VM(s). 1MB block size – support up to 256GB 4MB block size – Support up to 1024GB 8MB block size – Support up to 2048GB
9. The disks that are to be Hot-Added must be SCSI. IDE drives are not compatible with hotadd.
10. The proxy VM should have installed VMware tools and VMware tools should be upgraded immediately to the available newer version.
11. Linux VM’s are not supported for Network Mapping & IP ReMapping
12. GPT Format disk VM’s are not supported for Network Mapping & IP ReMapping
13. Application aware backup requires administration privileges in OS drive for Tool installation.
14. Encrypted VM backup/replication is not supported for vSphere host v6.5.
15. VM backup/replication having VM name with special characters { } will fail with modular exception error.
16. VM backup/replication may fail with “VMware Modular exception error” in case of ESXi compatibility/permission issue with respect to vCenter.
VMware VM Replication with FailOver & FailBack:
1. CD/DVD drives of virtual machines will not be replicated to the target host.
2. Resizing virtual disks after initial replication in the primary site will result in replication job failure permanently. Users have to configure a new job again to perform replication.
3. Source VM’s VMXNET3 ethernet adapter configuration will not be replicated to the replica VM. .
4. If the initial replication job fails intermittently during replication, users have to delete the replica VM in the target site and create a new job to perform the replication.
5. The VM should not be manually powered off or powered on after the FailOver & FailBack respectively. This may leads to data lose.
6. If the FailBack fails intermittently, users have to delete the FailBack VM in the target site and try again.
7. Failback only the modified data after failover feature is not supported.
8. Once after Permanent FailOver & Commit FailBack the replica VM will be excluded from the replication job. The same should be configured again for replication.
9. IP Re-Mapping is not working for windows 7(32 bit) Professional Machine.
10. IPv6 configuration is not supported for IP ReMapping.
11. IPRe-Mapping option is not supported for VM Replication in Linux based Backup Servers.
Hyper-V Backup:
1. PowerShell should be installed in Hyper-V host machines to configure Hyper-V backup.
2. Guest VMs running operating systems which do not support VSS such as Microsoft Windows 2000, Windows NT 4.0, or Windows XP, Linux will remain in a saved state while the VSS snapshot is created.
3. Virtual machines without Hyper-V Integration Services installed will remain in a saved state while the VSS snapshot is created.
4. VMs running on Windows Server 2008 are not supported for backup.
5. VMs running on Windows 2008 R2 CSV environment are not supported for backup.
6. VMs with checkpoints (*.AVHD & *.AVHDx) will not be backed up. To perform backup, checkpoints need to be removed.
7. For application consistency VM backup, the Guest Machine should be installed with the latest Hyper-V integration services.
8. Incremental will not continue after moving virtual disks to new storage for the particular Guest machine.
9. Incremental will not continue after performing Live Migration for the particular Guest machine.
10. “To perform live restore, enable ps remoting in remote machine (Open Power shell command -> Execute the below command Enable-PSRemoting –force or refer to this link “” https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh849694.aspx ) “.
11. Flat VMDK restore is not supported for Generation2 Guest OSes with more than 2TB disk.
12. Live restore with “Download as VHDx” is not supported on Windows Server 2008 R2 Remote machine.
13. Live Restore with “Download as VHD” is not supported for Generation2 Guest OSes with more than 2TB disk.
14. Live restore to Windows Server 2008 R2 and Windows Server 2012 is not supported for Generation 2 Guest Machines.
12. Performing Hyper-V backups in VMs is not supported.
13. Hyper-V agentless installation is not supported on machine where VMBackup Client installed.
14. While adding Hyper-V host, It’s password shouldn’t have single double quote(“).
15. Datastore created by Vembu BDR/Vembu OffsiteDR server during quick VM recovery will not be auto-removed when unmounted in Vembu console.
16. 6 GB RAM will be assigned by default for VMs booted via VMWare ESX(i) in quick VM recovery.