Well, can't imagine how somebody can pay money for VDPA. We gave VDP another shot this week and there are still no serious improvements. Below is a list of issues and annoyances we've found during our tests:
- VDP starts 10 minutes (sometimes 10 hours if you've a bad luck). It takes hours to solve issues that require reboots.
- Terrible CPU/power consumption 24 hours/day.
- Backup of powered-off VMs always fails in our production cluster. (But works fine in out lab.)
- FLR does not work in our production cluster. (But works fine in our lab.)
- FLR does not support ext4, XFS.
- 5000 files limit in one FLR restore operation.
- FLR client requires Adobe Flash, no Linux-friendly command-line FLR tools.
- FLR client must run inside VM which is backed-up by VDP. If you want to use one FLR client for multiple VDPs, its VM must be backed-up by ALL those VDPs. (Oh my God...)
- Upgrade from 5.1.10 to 5.1.11 fails.
- Cannot take the dedupe storage and mount it into a new appliance if the original one is damaged.
- Cannot backup individual VMDKs of a VM (Should be fixed in next major release.)
- Cannot specify backup jobs start times, all jobs start at the beginning of the backup window.
- If VM backup fails, VDP doesn't retry it after 30 minutes like VDR.
- No useful information what happens during the backup process (VMs which are just being backed-up, % of progress, etc.)
- Terrible logging, no useful logs available in Web Client. Looking for a reason why VM backup failed is a nightmare.
- Reports in GUI are simply useless compared to reports in VDR.
- All report times are in US AM/PM format only (probably a feature of the Web Client).
- ...etc, etc.
VDR had it's own problems but compared to VDP, it was an acceptable SMB backup software.
I must ask myself how many people work on VDP. One or two engineers in their free time? Definitely no more... Wouldn't be better to fix dedupe/integrity issues of VDR instead of replacing it with such a garbage? Together with SSO, this is another disaster that comes from the hasty integration of EMC products into vSphere.
And no, we really don't want to waste our time by opening SRs regarding some of the issues if there are so many design-related problems.