Friday, January 21, 2011

VCB basic usage - debugging

During the series of articles about VCB usage I supposed that all the presented VCB command examples are running smoothly and without errors. But this is not always true. There can  be a lot of reason why it is not working as expected, e.g. wrong permissions assigned to VCB backup user, misconfigured SAN which doesn't allow to access VMFS volumes or  unspecified problem with creating virtual machine snapshot.

If something goes wrong all VCB commands can be run in more verbose mode with command line switch -L and verbosity level from 0 to 6. The next example illustrates it. We want to perform a full backup of a virtual machine named vcb-backup and it seems the provided user vcbadmin doesn't have required permissions to do it:
vcbmounter -h host -u vcbadmin -p pass -a name:vcb-backup -r c:\mnt\vcb-backup -t fullvm -m nbd -L4
[2010-06-15 13:15:12.843 'vcbMounter' 360 info] Connected using API Namespace vim25.
[2010-06-15 13:15:12.843 'vcbMounter' 360 info] Authenticating user vcbadmin
[2010-06-15 13:15:12.859 'vcbMounter' 360 info] Logged in!
[2010-06-15 13:15:12.890 'vcbMounter' 360 info] Got VM MoRef
[2010-06-15 13:15:12.890 'vcbMounter' 360 info] Got access method
[2010-06-15 13:15:12.890 'vcbMounter' 360 info] Got coordinator object
[2010-06-15 13:15:12.890 'vcbMounter' 360 info] Attempting data access.
[2010-06-15 13:15:12.890 'vcbMounter' 360 info] Creating mount directory
[2010-06-15 13:15:12.890 'vcbMounter' 360 info] No snapshot info for this VM, nothing to do.
[2010-06-15 13:15:12.890 'vcbMounter' 360 info] Creating snapshot
[2010-06-15 13:15:19.296 'vcbMounter' 360 info] Snapshot created, ID: snapshot-579
[2010-06-15 13:15:19.296 'vcbMounter' 360 info] Mount operation created snapshot.
[2010-06-15 13:15:19.312 'vcbMounter' 360 info] Mount operation obtained backupinfo.
[2010-06-15 13:15:19.312 'vcbMounter' 360 info] Performing SearchIndex find.
[2010-06-15 13:15:19.328 'vcbMounter' 360 info] Successfully obtained instance lock.
[2010-06-15 13:15:24.359 'vcbMounter' 360 error] Error: No permission to perform this action.
[2010-06-15 13:15:24.359 'vcbMounter' 360 error] An error occurred, cleaning up...
[2010-06-15 13:15:24.359 'vcbMounter' 360 info] Performing SearchIndex find.
[2010-06-15 13:15:24.359 'vcbMounter' 360 info] Successfully obtained instance lock.
[2010-06-15 13:15:29.437 'vcbMounter' 360 info] Remove clone disks successful.
Deleted directory c:\vcb\vcb-backup
The bold line helps us to identify the cause of the problem.

No comments: