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InfoScale™ 9.0 Cluster Server Bundled Agents Reference Guide - Linux

Last Published: 2025-08-11

Product(s): InfoScale & Storage Foundation (9.0)

Platform: Linux

VMwareDisks agent

The VMwareDisks agent enables vMotion and VMware Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS) in InfoScale clusters that are configured and deployed on VMware virtual machines.

When a VCS cluster with a shared disk is configured on virtual machines, VMware does not support VMware Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS) and vMotion. Thus the vMotion and DRS capabilities are compromised. The solution to this issue is to attach the disks to a single virtual machine at a time in a VCS cluster. In case of a user-initiated failover or a fault-induced failover, these disks fail over (detach-attach) to the target virtual machine along with the service group. The VMwareDisks agent manages the detach and attach operations.

Support for VMware disks with NetBackup or user-initiated snapshots

VMware does not allow a disk to be detached if it is part of a snapshot; the snapshot must be deleted before the disk can be detached. A service group that contains resources of the VMwareDisks type may be taken offline or failed over from a virtual machine where snapshots are present. In this case, the resources cannot be taken offline until the snapshot is deleted.

When a failover is initiated on a system, any of the following conditions may occur:

Snapshots are present due to an active backup job.
Stale snapshots are present due to failed backup jobs.
User-initiated snapshots are present.

Any of these conditions may cause the disk detach operation to fail and consequently the failover stalls. Beginning with InfoScale 8.0, the VMwareDisks agent includes some snapshot management functions that help avoid such scenarios. The agent detects whether a VMware disk is associated with any NetBackup or user-initiated snapshots. It then consolidates the snapshots, if required, and removes them so that the disk can be detached, and the failover can proceed as expected.

Note:

Due to a restriction around the VMware API for data protection, the migration of a VM cannot be completed while a NetBackup job for VMware VM protection is in progress. You may choose to wait for the job to complete or you may cancel it.

Note:

This support is not yet available for disks in NetBackup configurations that involve multiple master servers.

Requirements for proper functioning of the agent

To ensure proper functioning of the VMwareDisks agent, verify the following settings:

If you change the disk naming scheme from an enclosure-based naming scheme (for example, r7515-xxx-yyy_vmdk0_0) to a operating system-native naming scheme, then you must set the disk.EnableUUID=TRUE attribute in the VMware virtual machine's properties.
Set the disk.EnableUUID=TRUE attribute in the virtual machine's properties and confirm that the disk's UUID is visible in the vxdisk -px LIST_DMP list command output. The agent scans the disks and checks for the disk UUID in the vxdisk -px LIST_DMP list output. If disk UUIDs are absent, the agent may fail to bring the resource online and get faulted.
The VMware disks are in the persistent mode. If the disks are in the independent mode, the agent reverts them to the persistent mode in case of a failover.
The ESX/ESXi host or vCenter user has administrative privileges or is a root user. If you do not want to use the administrator account or the root user, create a role with the privileges that are required to perform operations on the VMwareDisks resource. Then, assign this role to one or more users.
The role assigned to the user account must have the following privileges at a minimum:
- Low level file operations
- Add existing disk
- Change resource
- Remove disk
In case of configurations with disks that are part of snapshots, the privileges to remove user-initiated snapshots or to view and manage NetBackup jobs are also required. Beyond these privileges, you can provide additional ones according to the needs of your configuration.
In case of a vCenter user, you must assign the requisite privileges for the user to access the datastore.

To assign vCenter roles and privileges

Log on to the vCenter Server and navigate to Home > Inventory > Datastores and Datastore Clusters.
From the vCenter inventory tree view, right-click the appropriate datacenter, and select Add Permission.
Alternatively, open the Permissions tab. On the Permissions pane, right-click and select Add Permission.
In the Assign Permissions window, add the user, select the role, and assign privileges.
For details, refer to VMware vSphere ESXi and vCenter Server Documentation.