Acronis backup advanced 11.5 for VMware issues
I have 2 issues going on with Acronis. We are doing backup to a NAS and to a HP tape auto-loader. We are using VMware Vcenter 4.1 (someone thought it was a good idea to cancel subscription). We have to ESXi hosts that both have Acronis appliances on them. I am backing up 2 servers 1 on each host. I am running Acronis on a physical server 2008r2 machine so I could use a SAS card to hook up the autoloader.
1 The NAS issue I'm having is with the retention. Ideally I would like to have 1 full backup per month and all the incremental. After 30 days move the backups from 1 dir to another for 3 months. so it would have current month in A last month in b and 2 months ago in c. At my last job we did this using 2 backup plans, one for full backups and 1 for incremental. On the full backup plan we used a batch file that looked like this. .
del z:\c\*.* /q
move z:\b\*.* z:\c
move z:\a\*.* z:\b
When I originally created the backup plans i spoke with Acronis support and they told me to use the retention rules and it would do this automatically. It has not done this yet and it has been in place since October. It will keep all the backups in the A dir and continue to add full backups and incrementals. I will also get random backups in B that don't even match to the schedule of the backup plan.
Would using a the method from my past job work in this application or does anyone have any suggestions?
Now my second problem with the tape backups( oh fun stuff)
My tape backups keep failing and in the error message it is because I am out of room on the C: drive of the "management machine". This machine has 272 GB of storage. 203GB resides in the C:\ProgramData\Acronis\BackupAndRecovery\TapeLocation dir and Acronis says that I can not delete this or the tapes will become useless. I can however move it and do a junction. This has been only in place since October. My company wants to keep tape for infinity moving forward and I fear we will never be able to accommodate the storage needed just for that location. ANY IDEA???????
Thank you so much in advance. I actually had an Acronis tech hang up on me earlier from asking too many questions.
Hello,
I am using Acronis Backup Advanced Version 11.5 Update 5 (Build 11.5.38929). This is running in a VMware 5.5 environment with 3 hosts in a cluster. I have HA and DRS enabled. I am trying to perform a restore/recovery of a full VM. When I set up the Recovery plan/task I specify what I want to restore, and where I want to restore to, and make sure that option for the restored VM does not power on after restore is completed is set properly. When I initiate the restore, it immediately fails within 60 seconds, and tells me that the server name "blahblahblah" already exists. I know it exists. But I haven't restored it yet nor is it powered on, so why does Acronis care if it's a duplicate name? Or perhaps my other question is, can I restore a VM and give it a new name and IP address so that it doesn't conflict with the existing machine? I cannot power down the existing machine because it's in production. I simply need to perform a restore for DR purposes to prove the restore function works. However, performing multiple restores to different hosts within the cluster or even to a host outside the cluster results in the same failure. Could you please help? Thanks!
Alex
Hi Alex,
vSphere doesn't allow name conflicts within one datacenter/folder, so VMs names must be unique. You can restore the VM with new name even if original VM still exists on the host. Remember to check corresponding option when configuring VM recovery. See attached screen shot, hope it helps!
Thank you.
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Best regards,
Vasily
Acronis Virtualization Program Manager
