VMware: Yep, ESXi bug plays 'finders keepers' with data backups

Running VMware’s ESXi and diligently backing up your data in the belief it’s safe as houses? Think again. VMware has quietly ‘fessed up to the existence of a bug affecting all versions of its bare-metal hypervisor. It copped the problem in its knowledge base as users began cottoning on to the fact something was amiss in their …

[Spender]

QuaryChangedDisckAreas? Really? Not QueryChangedDiskAreas?

[chivo243]

Isn't a quary where rocks come from? Just spelled quarry?

[A A]

VMware has been dropping the ball a lot lately. This is not the first or worse problem they have had with no resolution in sight.

[Anonymous Coward]

Agreed - to focused chasing clouds.. unfortunate they are rain clouds that will p*ss on their domination of the VM market.

[reddiesel]

We were told about this already:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/10/27/esxi_is_telling_fibs_to_backup_software/

[Anonymous Coward]

How exactly do you disable and then re-enable CBT? Yes we're too lazy to google it, so some clearer info would have been nice please el-reg :)

[Anonymous Coward]

"Yes we're too lazy"

http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=1031873

[Adam Inistrator]

restores

people want restores not backups .. is your restore working? and how to really really tell?

[pi3]

Re: restores

That's the scary thing about this bug. There is no way to detect if a backup image is bad or not. There is no way to tell if a restored VM actually has all its data. There might be a few blocks of empty data in one file or many but VM will boot and filesystem is fine.

[Wensleydale Cheese]

128GB is nowt really

"128GB won't affect everybody running ESXi, but it will hit those running very large clouds and virtual instances."

As I discovered recently, installing Docker allocates 100GB in one fell swoop for its container file.

This "buggette" could be affecting quite modest installations.

In fact once I realised I needed to expand my VM by so much I installed Docker on a real machine instead of a virtual one, so it's a case of "I could have been bitten by this".

[PowerMan@thinksis]

Called "Good Enough" technology

More examples of "Good Enough" technology customers choose to run their businesses on. Deal with it!

[anthonypoh]

disable then re-enable CBT

..... but will disabling and re-enabling CBT fix the erroneous info on disk sectors? Would it not just re-corrupt whenever a block is changed and CBT logs it?

I guess the only way to be sure is to do a Full backup everyday..... I'd hate to be the admin running fulls on 128GB VMs......