Backup

Announcing the App Volumes Backup Fling

~ vDelboy ~ Leave a comment

It gives me great pleasure to announce the first Fling that I have worked on.

Over the last couple months Chris Halstead, Stephane Asselin and I have been working on the new App Volumes Backup Fling.

Picture1

This tool will help customers to backup their AppStacks and Writable Volumes VMDK files using their standard backup tools, normally backup tools do not see these files as they are not seen with in the vCenter inventory unless they are connected to a users virtual desktop.

Below you will find a number of links where you can find more information about the App Volumes Backup Fling.

Fling Download

App Volumes Back Fling

Video Demo

You can also see the full announcement on VMware.com here

For instructions on how to use the Fling see the blog here

Please feel free to leave any feedback for Chris, Stephane and I and any features you would like to see added.

Veeam NFC Storage Connection is Unavailable

~ vDelboy ~ Leave a comment

I am currently doing some testing in my lab around backing up App Volumes, more to come on this in the new year, and I needed a backup solution to do my testing. I decided to use Veeam Backup and Replicate 8 as being a vExpert I get a free 1 year NFR license to use the product. Thanks Veeam for this benefit.

The product was easy to setup but when I came to make my first back I kept getting the following error.

NFC Storage Connection is Unavailable

After a couple of google searches I found the following KB article here. Having read through the article I started to look at the log files. The log files can be found on the Veeam server is this location.

%ProgramData%\Veeam\Backup\Backup_Job_Name

After looking at the logs I didn’t have any of the issues mentioned in the KB article but I did notice the following errors.

ERR |Failed to initiate NFC session. Target host: [10.0.1.200]. VI connection ID: [vcenter.delboyshome.com]. Storage MOID: [200-Local].

[22.12.2015 20:04:44] <  1592>      ERR |SSL error, code: [336151568].error:14094410:SSL routines:SSL3_READ_BYTES:sslv3 alert handshake failure

[22.12.2015 20:04:44] <  1592>      >>  |SSL_connect() function call has failed.

[22.12.2015 20:04:44] <  1592>      >>  |Failed to establish connection with the SSL server.

[22.12.2015 20:04:44] <  1592>      >>  |Cannot initialize new SSL connection.

[22.12.2015 20:04:44] <  1592>      >>  |Authd handshake has failed.

[22.12.2015 20:04:44] <  1592>      >>  |NFC session with the specified ticket [52 fc d5 d8 27 e2 4a 73-57 79 e2 13 85 b7 60 e8] is unavailable. Target host: [10.0.1.200].

[22.12.2015 20:04:44] <  1592>      >>  |Cannot connect to NFC session. Target host: [10.0.1.200]. Storage: [200-Local]. VI SOAP connection ID: [vcenter].

After some more goggling around I found that in ESXi 6.0U1 SSLv3 is now disabled by default and would need to be re-enabled, on all of my hosts, or at least on the host doing the backup specifically, SSLv3 would need re-enabling for post 902.

Thankfully the issue and easily be fixed. To fix the issue you can follow the simple steps in this KB from VMware found here.