Cluster Server 8.0 Bundled Agents Reference Guide - Windows
- Introducing VCS bundled agents
- Storage agents
- Network agents
- FileShare agents
- Services and applications agents
- VCS infrastructure and support agents
- VCS hardware replication agent for NetApp
- Troubleshooting bundled agents
VMwareDisks agent
The VMwareDisks agent enables vMotion and VMware Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS) in InfoScale clusters configured and deployed on virtual machines in a VMware environment.
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 would be 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.
After the attach or detach operations, the tasks of initializing and managing the disks are performed by the VMNSDg agent (for SFW environment) and NativeDisks agent (for LDM environment).
Note:
You must use an encrypted password in the ESXDetails attribute. This password is used to connect to the ESX/ESXi host or vCenter Server. For more information, refer to the section about encrypting agent passwords in the Cluster Server Administrator's Guide.
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.
To ensure proper functioning of the VMwareDisks agent, verify the following settings:
Ensure that the VirtualDiskMode attribute value matches the mode in which the VMware disks are attached. Otherwise, after a failover occurs, the VMwareDisks agent reverts them to the mode mentioned in the VirtualDiskMode attribute.
The ESX/ESXi host user account has administrative privileges or is a root user. If you do not want to use the administrator user account or the root user, create a role with the required privileges for VMwareDisks resource functionality and 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.
If the user is a vCenter user, you must assign the requisite privileges so that the user can 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.