Hello All,
I am hoping you can shed some light on an issue we encountered today. We run on a NetApp SAN and use a NetApp backup application called Virtual Storage Console for backups. This tool works very well and simply takes advantage of the VMware snapshot funtion on the VMs, conducts a snapshot of the LUN, and then consolidates the VM snapshots. Until now we have conducted backups without triggering VM snapshots. This is mainly because over the years I have seen various issues with snapshots on running VMs that I find concerning. I know that without snapshots we risk some inconsistencies in the restored files should we need to perform a recovery. I keep many backup instances and also conduct SQL server backups on the VMs with databases so I do not lose data on those. That said, I decided to give it a go with VM snapshots and had an unpleasant surprise. The Virtual Storage Console backup job ran perfectly but out of the 40 VMs we backed up several stopped communicating with the network requiring a reboot to restore communications. Needless to say this got the attention of our users in a not so pleasant way.
Has anyone seen this before? The Windows event logs on the VMs offer no clues.
Thanks,
Paul