I’ve recently rebuilt my homelab, and as part of bring a nested lab, I like to have my nested host VMs to poweron automatically as I do for my VCSA. However, I configured (Or at least I thought I had) the Autostart option on sll 3 of the nested hosts. After sitting down powering on the physical host, I waited approximately 10 minutes for it all to boot up, which is about normal, unfortunately, I could not connect to anything but the physical ESXi host, to which I found all 3 VMs powered off all with AutoStart option on them.
As you can see above, all VMs have Autostart enabled on them with their start order, and yet they are all powered off. What I found was that there is a separate service for Autostart that need to be enabled before the start order will operate.
To enable:
Select Manage -> Autostart -> Edit Settings
Under Settings, select Enable = Yes -> Click Save
Once completed, restart your ESXi host to ensure the settings are operation.
Month: February 2018
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Configure ESXi 6.5 Autostart
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Extended Unstun Times with VVOLs and Veeam Proxy Fixed in 9.5 Update 3
Recently Veeam released Veeam Backup and Replication 9.5 Update 3″ This update has brought a number of fixes and additional features that you can read about in Anthony Spiteri’s post VEEAM BACKUP & REPLICATION 9.5 UPDATE 3 – TOP NEW FEATURES
This particular release brings a welcomed fix for backing up VVOL backed VMs when using a proxy server. The symptoms occur when you backup a VM that is utilising VVOL storage and a proxy server with hotadd. The snapshot attempts to remove too soon before the HotAdded disk finishes its unbind process. When this occurs the VM can freeze anywhere from a number of seconds up to 80+ seconds. These issues were not present when the backup proxy was on the same host as the VM that was backing up. The workaround prior to this release was to run in NBD mode which uses the host as a proxy and is a slower method.
So, what am I looking for? The most obvious symptom is when your VM freezes and can not perform any actions, however performance graphs, etc all should a healthy VM. The other is in your VM log file, you will find a line similar to below. this is a standard line in your log, the difference is the the length of time the process runs for. In this sample: 56 secondsCheckpoint_Unstun: vm stopped for 56223314 us
In Veeam B&R 9.5U3, you can now add a registry value to set a wait time to allow the unbind from the proxy to complete before the snapshot is removed. to do this, open up your Veeam B&R server -> Open RegEdit -> navigate to:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Veeam\Veeam Backup and Replication\
Create a new REG_DWORD: HotaddTimeoutAfterDetachSec
Using decimal set your wait time (value) in seconds for how long you require.
Once added, you can restart your server\services for the settings to take affect. After testing overnight with a few Backup jobs, I re-enabled all jobs to run through proxies and have not seen any issues yet.