2 months of use of Acronis 12

Hi Lubos,

First of all thank you for sharing your experience even though it was not a good one and it's sad to hear what you had to go through. Our managers are looking through the support cases you've submitted to get a full picture of what went so badly and to contact you with proper resolution plan. In the meantime let me comment on all the items:

1) There are indeed some known open issues with run VM from backup if it contains LVMs, but the issues which we're aware of are related to specific LVMs setup and are not reproduced in all scenarios. For example the error "/dev/mapper/ubuntu-vg-root does not exist" (issue ID: ABR-104577) may appear for Ubuntu VMs which have LVMs - this problem we have fixed in the upcoming update for v12 (coming in a couple of weeks). At the same time, this scenario is not reproduced for RHEL 6 and 7 machines even with current build of v12. The same problems do not strike for Acronis Backup for VMware 9 since that version was mounting such machines "as is", while in v12 we've added ability to recover files from LVMs from VM backups which was not possible in v9 and this forced us to change the way the backup is created and mounted/restored, which causes problems we continue to solve.

2) We will try reproducing this problem, however I do remember trying this feature for myself quite a lot of times and I've never noticed that the option "power on" doesn't work properly. By default it is "On" indeed, but turning it off did work for me. Still we should be able to figure this out.

3) The appliance update feature is planned for future update for v12 (feature ID: ABR-111816) which we plan for the beginning of the next year. Note that appliances in v12 do not contain backup configuration data except for network settings and appliance name, i.e. they are nearly stateless opposed to Acronis Backup for VMware 9 where appliances kept all the backup configurations and other settings. I understand that this specific still doesn't completely solve the issue, but it should be less painful to re-deploy appliances assuming it.

4) This definitely should be investigated properly as it's quite a non-normal situation. We've not got reports on this specific behavior so far, so investigation will be required. It's definitely unrelated to snapshot creation (which occurs around 10-20% of the total progress, not at 70+), and unrelated to VMware Tools which are importat at snapshot creation stage and when using files/folders exclusions feature. 

Again, thank you for sharing the experience and I still do believe we can find proper solutions for you.

Thank you.

Hello Vasily,

Today i open another support ticket - i found that on some other deployment of AB 12 update of VM  annotations about backup time and backup status is working ... but it is still not working in our infra for some reason. Your agent checked the system remotely and find the problem ... and guess what was the problem ? ... surprisingly not updated vmware tools. I was able to convince him that this can't be the case only after i found some other machine with up to date tools and annotations not filled as well. After that agent realized that the issue must be with vmware itself and i need to open support case in vmware. Again it took some time to convince the agent that the problem can't be the vmware as VMP9 that is still running on part of our infra within same vcenter can update the annotations with no problem. After that he ran out of ideas (he said that he never faced such issue before) so we stopped the investigation. You must be really proud on your support ... may be prouder than on your devs that can create such marvelous product.

I understand that every new product has some problems/bugs within it but in this case it looks to me that there was really no or very little testing and you released some kind of alpha product. And you are making things even worse with totaly unqualified support.

I'm sorry for my harsh words but i'm really frustrated as right now i'm not sure what to do .... I payed money for something that i must fight with every day in order to have at least some backups. Or i can throw away money that i spend on purchase of AB and its deployment and look for some other backup solution.

BR,

Lubos

Hi Lubos,

The truth is that there is are annotations about backups put for VMs with v12 yet. This feature didn't make it into initial release of v12 and is pending for the next update (id: ABR-107970). It's really frustrating for me to find that you were misleaded in such a weird way :( I'm going to check this case with our support managers to see what went wrong. Please let us reach out to you from our side and figure this out.

Also concerning the original issue #1 (run VM for LVMs): I've made some digging through this issue and found that the originally reported problem was in inconsistent data in VM running from backup, while the recovery of the same VM didn't have the problem. During the investigation we've even got a backup image from you, but in our tests even recovery (not only Run VM) of this image was showing data corruption and at this point the next instructions were to take a backup of the VM while it's in offline state and check the problem with this new backup (check data corruption in recovery and Run VM separately) - this should've excluded possibility of corruption inside the image itself and that was the point where the investigation stopped with no results. 

This is the first time we see anything like this actually, which is why this issue takes so long and looks so frustrating. My best guess is that it has to deal with the fact that VMs were created from the same template and somehow the backup using appliance interferred with other VMs disks instead of the proper one, since the backup is done in hot-add mode, but I can't say anything definite right now.

Thank you.

Hello Vasily,

If i understand you properly you say that there are no annotations about backups in AB 12 yet?

BR,

Lubos

The annotations are not set for VMs in vSphere after backup yet - this is correct. (the ones you see are likely leftovers from the previous version).

They are ... i can show you. We have a deployment at our customer (done by us) with Acronis backup 12 virtual host where after backup of each VM annotations is updated with Backup status (now "OK", previously in VMP 9 it was "Successfull") and Last backup (date).

Version is as follows:

Web console service: v.12.0.2607

Backup management server: v.12.0.3602

Backup management console: v.12.0.6081

ESXi appliance is 12.0 3602

Task that updates the machine custom value is done by backup account ... so it is for sure done by AB 12.

There indeed can be inconsistencies here, since this functionality has not been tested before Acronis Backup 12 release and therefore we've not advertised it. The VM annotations were bind to vCenter integration functionality in v11.7 and v9, but in v12 they were not "reanimated" which is why we have planned it for an update. I will double-check with our QA team, but we've already got reports that in v12 annotations are not present/updated, so this functionality is for sure not working properly.

Edit/update: https://forum.acronis.com/forum/123914 - that was your original report on VM annotation-related problems.

Hello Vasily,

well after 2 months of investigation we are exactly where we were before 2 moths .... our backups are failing and the root cause is unclear. Really frustrating ....

BR,

Lubos

Lubos,

Can you please send me the ticket ID where the backup problem was reported so that I can check and advise?

Thank you.

Vasily,

case ID is 02820931. I don't think there is much to advice .... there is also managers call opened for this one .... may be just 1 advice for others not to use AB 12. I spent hours with your support in online sessions. Thing is simple ... we payed for a product ... we payed maintenance fee every year and have valid support contract .... we spent lot of hours trying to fix/use/investigate your non product .... and the result is 0 - we have non working backup slution.

Lubos

Just an update to this topic .. after 6 months of spending hours and hours with support persons from Acronis result is 0. Backups are still failing and Acronis is not able to provide any solution ....

Well and the funniest thing on all this is that i'm receiving emails from Acronis "Last Chance: Make Money with Acronis Backup 12 Advanced and See it Live!" .. and so ... i really don't understand how i can make money with non working product and by spending my time with useless support team?

Lubos

Hi Lubos,

I've reviewed the case and from what I could see we're dealing with unique situation where the "service_process" process is taking enormous amount of RAM during the backup and we've not seen this behavior before (it's tied to particular enviroment). If it was a simple issue which can be stably reproduced or had some predictable behavior pattern then it wouldn't take so much time to get resolved. This is quite a bad situation and I totally understand your frustration but we have to deal with what we have unfortunately. The next step is a remote assistance session which as I can see was requested by our developers to check the environment and get more clues on what's going on. 

Thank you.

Vasily,

i doubt this is unique situation .... we have 2 totaly separated and different deployments of AB12 where both of them are suffering from same problems so it is not the only isolated case (1 big with undreds of VMs and second small with only few). Also this is not purely only about technical side (which is tragedy of course) ... i opened also manager call for this matter where some manager stopped to communicate with me .. despite i received email that i'll be contacted within 24 hours. It is 50/50 technical/customer approach from Acronis side.

BR,

Lubos

hi to all,

we too agree with Lubos, we are in the same situation, coming from acronis v9 where we was almost satisfied, but after upgrading to acronis backup for vmware v12 we are in a sea of problmes of every kind.

For us the biggest problem is that the support team is too slow and has crearly difficults in giving functional solutions.

we have also encoutering that:

- sometimes backup tasks arn't executed without any errors or alert

- sometimes backup tasks are executed apparentely with no problems, but at the end of the task the backup isn't present in the archive

- sometimes some tasks starts correctly, but then disappear without alert, or warinngs

- we also have problems with large size disk machine (>1tb) where sometimes tasks faults because of snapshot problem

in percentage terms, about 50% of tasks doesn't complete randomly, and all the tasks containing vms with disk > of 100gb fails almost everytime.

our environmente is a vmware virtual san with 7 hosts (esx 6.0)

as sayed, for us the biggest problem is the support team wich havn't solutions, for some VMs we have started backupping them using another product, because we havn't other choices.