Problem
Ideally, every System Recovery configuration that is supported in a traditional physical environment would also be supported in any virtual environment without qualification. It may not always be possible. This document provides information about support for System Recovery within a virtual environment, notes about limitations of System Recovery support in a virtual environment, and links to related articles.Solution
The following terms are used in this document:| Term | Definition |
|---|---|
| Guest operating system | The operating system that is installed on a virtual machine. |
| Hypervisor | The software platform running on a physical server that hosts one or more virtual machines. |
| Virtual machine (VM) | The emulation of a single physical machine within a hypervisor. |
General Guidelines for Support
Veritas provides support for System Recovery within a virtual environment. For the purpose of this document, a "virtual environment" is defined as any onsite, offsite, or public cloud IaaS virtualization solution where System Recovery can be installed into a supported guest operating system.
System Recovery has an open support policy for virtualization platforms, as follows:
System Recovery is qualified on physical configurations.
If the same configuration can be virtualized, it is supported without explicit qualification on the virtualization platform (unless otherwise noted in this document).
The published System Recovery software compatibility listings reflect this support policy. The version specific links for the software compatibility is available here:
Veritas System Recovery 18 software compatibility list (SCL)
Note the following limitations of System Recovery support within a virtual environment:
- Support of hardware or software as published in the System Recovery compatibility listings is subject to mutual support by the hardware/software vendor and the hypervisor vendor. Specifically:
- The hardware/software vendors must support their products within the hypervisor.
- The hypervisor vendor must support use of the hardware/software product within the hypervisor.
- Such hardware/software products include operating systems, cluster servers, peripherals, drivers, patches, databases, applications, and so on.
- When operating System Recovery within a virtual machine, the hypervisor may introduce conditions (such as contention for shared resources or other interruptions) that were not present during standard qualification. Additional tuning and configuration may be required to address any resulting delay, retry, or timeout conditions. Contact the hypervisor vendor first for tuning and configuration suggestions.
- System Recovery may experience lesser performance when it is virtualized. It may be necessary to increase system resources to address a performance issue.
- For VMware - https://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/techpaper/VMW-Tuning-Latency-Sensitive-Workloads.pdf
- For Hyper-V - https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd722835(v=bts.10).aspx
- For Hyper-V - https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dn567657.aspx
- Using a hypervisor vendor's interface to suspend, resume, or otherwise disrupt execution of System Recovery is not supported. The impact upon System Recovery operations and data is unknown. Only System Recovery management interfaces are supported for System Recovery control.
- Using System Recovery within VM high availability, replication, or transfer solutions is supported but not qualified by Veritas. Examples of such solutions are vSphere HA, host-based replication, vMotion, and Storage vMotion (but not limited to VMware). As a virtualized application, System Recovery is unaware of being deployed within a VM, and support for such operations is provided by the hypervisor vendor.
- Passthrough configurations (SCSI, FC, USB etc) that provide access to physical hardware, as a backup target device, from inside a virtualized server are not officially supported within System Recovery (and if configured may exhibit connectivity or performance issues that affect backup and restore operations)
- In the event that a support case is needed, System Recovery technical support will make every reasonable attempt to resolve the issue within the virtual environment. In some cases, the configuration used will fall under the "alternative support" term and as such the issues experienced must also be reproducible in a fully supported environment. In rare circumstances, Veritas reserves the right to qualify, limit, exclude, or discontinue implicit support for a System Recovery configuration due to unforeseen incompatibilities within the hypervisor environment. In the rare case of a System Recovery failure due to a hypervisor operation, it may be necessary to recover from a backup.
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Please note that this document is a translation from English, and may have been machine-translated. It is possible that updates have been made to the original version after this document was translated and published. Veritas does not guarantee the accuracy regarding the completeness of the translation. You may also refer to the English Version of this knowledge base article for up-to-date information.