VMware vSphere 5.1 has been in the market for more than a few months now and the interest in the new capabilities is high. Because of this the market saw many backup vendors rush to announce support for vSphere 5.1 in their VADP (vStorage APIs for Data Protection) integration. Everything looked clean and shiny and new.
On November 21, Symantec made an interesting announcement1. In a nutshell, the statement was that support for vSphere 5.1 would be delayed in its NetBackup and Backup Exec products. It was because they discovered issues while testing the VADP 5.1 API for integration. The API in the current form may introduce risk in performing consistent backups and ensuring reliable restores. All vendors receive the same API, not all vendors perform the same level of testing.
In order to explain the intricacies, first we need to take a quick look at how a backup product is integrated with VMware vSphere. With each release of vSphere, VMware publishes a set of APIs known as VMware APIs for Data Protection or VADP. One of the key components of VADP is Virtual Disk Development kit aka VDDK. This is the component through which third party code receives authenticated access to vSphere Datastores and virtual machine disk files. VMware makes this component available to its technology partners. Partners (backup product vendors in this case) ship this along with their product that has calls to vStorage APIs.
With each version of vSphere, an equivalent version of VDDK is released. The VDDK is generally backward compatible to one or more earlier versions of vSphere. For example, VDDK 5.1 supports2 vSphere 5.1, 5.0 and 4.1. VDDK 5.0 supports3 vSphere 5.0, 4.1, 4.0 and VI 3.5. Since the updated VDDK is required to understand the modified data structures in a new version of vSphere, lower versions of VDDK are in general not supported for accessing a higher version of vSphere. For example, VMware historically and currently (as of today) does not support the use of VDDK 5.0 to access datastores in vSphere 5.1. VMware documents supported versions of vSphere for each of its VDDK versions in release notes.
The key to remember is the statement in bold face above. VMware does not support any violated combinations because of the risks and uncertainties. The partners are expected to ship the correct version of VDDK when they announce the availability of support for a given vSphere release.
What Symantec announced and VMware confirmed4 is that VDDK 5.1 has issues and hence the support for vSphere 5.1 in its products will be delayed. This makes sense since VDDK 5.1 is the only version currently allowed to access vSphere 5.1. The face-saving reactions from other vendors to this announcement revealed some of the dirty games and ugly truths to come out in the area of VADP/VDDK integration.
- Vendors were claiming support for vSphere 5.1 but still shipping VDDK 5.0 with their products. This is currently not supported by VMware because of the uncertainties. This may change but at the time vendors claiming support, they were taking risks that typically are not acceptable in field of data protection business.
- Vendors were mucking with API calls and silently killing hung processes. That may work for an isolated or random hang. But will not work when there are repeatable hang situations like those observed in VDDK 5.1. Plus, there are performance and reliability concerns in abruptly ending sessions with vSphere.
- Most vendors weren’t testing all the edge cases and never realized the problems in VDDK 5.1, thus prematurely announcing support for 5.1
If your backup vendor currently supports vSphere 5.1, be sure to ask what their situation is.
Sources and references:
1. Quality wins every time: vSphere 5.1 support update, Symantec official blog.
2. VDDK 5.1 Release Notes, VMware Support resources
3. VDDK 5.0 Release Notes, VMware Support resources
4. Third-party backup software using VDDK 5.1 may encounter backup/restore failures, VMware Support KB
