VDR is a great backup appliance for the SMB. It’s free, which is always a great price point, however it isn’t as reliable as some of the “big boy” solutions that exist out there.

I recently had an issue with VDR where I needed to do a restore on a VM, however VDR was in the middle of an integrity check, which means no restores. So after waiting a day-ish to do the restore, the integrity check decides to fail with a…

That certainly sounds good right? Well atleast now that the integrity check is done I can do my restore, then fix that error later.

So after waiting over a day for the integrity check to finish( they can take an infamously long time) I still can’t do my Restore. I mean WTF?!?!

Needless to say after several more integrity checks, and trying everything I could think of to get it to complete, including spinning up another VDR appliance attaching the destination there, and scouring the forums and trying anything I could find, I decided to call Support.

Support told me something to try that I hadn’t seen in the forums, and they said was going to be a KB, but hadn’t made it that far yet. They also said there was some risk involved. He wasn’t more explicit than that, but just FYI.

Essentially we log into the appliance, stop the service, create an ini file, and start the service. Sounds simple right? Well it might be if you are familiar with Linux commands, which I am not. So after doing it on a few different appliances, I have the exact steps down from the second you open the console to the appliance

I couldn’t get the formatting right in wordpress so I took a screen

After doing these steps, not only did the Integrity Check complete successfully, but it also takes significantly less time(hours instead of days). Double win.

Hope this Helps! Let me know!


Categories: vCenterVMware

6 Comments

Hersey · June 29, 2012 at 9:59 am

Good info, great post!

Did support give you any information on any potential issues setting these options may cause?

Could another issue be introduced later if Full De-duplication Data Check is not done (assuming that setting DedupeFullIgnoreDataCheck to 1 is turning it off)?

Hersey

    C-Rad · June 29, 2012 at 10:22 am

    Great Question.. and my simple answer is I don’t know. From the two inserted values, they atleast didn’t seem scary or like they might cause issues, but I don’t know. I can say that I have been using it like this for close to a month now in multiple environments and I personally haven’t had any issues.

    I will however, revert delete that ini file from the appliance/destination that was giving me issues, and try another integrity check to see if it goes back to failing…that might atleast say whether this should be a long-term or temp fix. I will see if I can get to that this weekend.

Hooshi · July 1, 2012 at 12:10 pm

Thnx mate.That was so helpful.anyway

cheers

GB@CFS · July 18, 2012 at 4:52 pm

Hi,

Having the same problem. Have you since deleted that .ini file and all ok?

Cheers,
GB

    C-Rad · August 1, 2012 at 9:41 am

    Yeah it seems ok. The Integrity check still takes a long time, but it completes successfully. The important thing is just to make sure you mark the damaged restore points for deletion.

Guy · August 29, 2012 at 3:53 am

Found a similar article offering an additional few options to these which may assist: http://sumoomicrosoft.blogspot.co.uk/2012/07/vmware-data-recovery-error-2241.html#!/2012/07/vmware-data-recovery-error-2241.html

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