v9.1 Release Notes

Release Date: 20 January 2020

New Features

Native Tape Support

NAKIVO Backup & Replication now provides native tape support for automated tape libraries (including VTL) as well as standalone tape drives. The product allows managing your tape environment and automating the backup to tape process to provide long-term retention of data.  

Linux Physical Machine Support

Linux physical machines are now supported by NAKIVO Backup & Replication. The product allows to perform incremental, app-aware backup of Linux machines to achieve higher backup performance, protect your data, and perform instant recovery of files and objects. 

Improvements

  • Boot verification of VMware and Microsoft Hyper-V backups and replicas

  • Additional Transporter load can be assigned for recovery jobs 

  • Transporter can be assigned to a specific host in a cluster

  • Standalone replica failback jobs

  • Maximum Transporter load is expanded to 1024 concurrent tasks

  • Support of vSphere 6.7 U3 

  • Support of QNAP QTS 4.4 

  • Support of Windows 10 Pro

  • Recovery of VMware VMs to the original location

Known Issues

Product Usability

  • You can see an incorrect maintenance end date due to missing information in the old license. Please contact support@nakivo.com to obtain an updated license

  • You may be unable to update from v7.2 and older due to missing information in the old license. Please contact support@nakivo.com to obtain an updated license

  • It is possible to downgrade the Western Digital NAS package to an older version, which can lead to lost product configuration

Platform Limitations

  • If a Transporter is installed on Windows Server 2008R2 or later, it is recommended to set SAN Policy to OfflineShared or OfflineAll

  • File recovery can fail if the HDD's Virtual Device Node is SATA and Transporter proceeding the job is installed on Windows

  • Linux Transporter should be used for replicating/backing up VMs with SATA disks

  • VMware vSphere Transporter Appliance cannot be deployed to ESXi older than 5.0

  • CBT Driver for Hyper-V 2012(R2) is not available

  • Backup and replication of Hyper-V VMs with shared drives are not supported

  • Hyper-V on Windows Nano Server cannot be added to NAKIVO Backup & Replication Inventory

  • If the same Hyper-V VM is processed by multiple jobs simultaneously, some of the jobs may fail to create VM checkpoint

  • Issues with Integration Services for Ubuntu 12.04 Server (x64), and SLES 11 SP3/SP4 (x64) prevent connecting to source VMs running on Hyper-V

  • Recovery job on Microsoft Hyper-V does not allow creating VMs with identical names

  • Application-aware processing for AWS EC2 may freeze when using domain credentials

  • Failback EC2 instances action with Original Location option selected turns off the source instance instead of terminating it

  • Replication across different AWS account types is not supported

  • Backup of encrypted EBS volumes may be unavailable for certain AWS EC2 transporter instance types

  • Replica AMIs and recovered EC2 instances have "Platform" attribute set to "Other Linux" due to AWS API limitations

  • Bandwidth throttling is not applicable for backing up Instances to local Amazon EC2 Regions with a single Transporter

  • SAN transport mode doesn't work when the solution is running on QNAP NAS

  • AWS accounts in China (Beijing and Ningxia regions) and Asia-Pacific (Osaka-local) are not supported

  • Connection with Transporter on Windows 10 physical machine is lost when it goes into sleep mode or restarts after installing system updates
  • File recovery to an original location may fail if the Windows machine to which you wish to recover an item has too many disks (with and without drive letters)

Reliability

  • With backup copy jobs, the value of the job speed on the dashboard can vary from the value provided via bandwidth throttling settings

  • When restarting a recovered VM with dynamic disks mounted to Transporter, dynamic disks may not be recognized

  • VMs that were recovered from encrypted source VMs with NVRAM settings modified may fail to boot

  • Authentication to Active Directory using NTLMv2 cannot be performed

  • Deployment of source Transporter and source VM from the same Windows VM template may cause backup corruption in HotAdd mode

  • Authentication error occurs for jobs with Microsoft Exchange 2010 logs truncation enabled in case user credentials miss a domain name

Feature Limitations

NAKIVO Backup & Replication features require certain conditions to function properly. For more details about feature requirements, refer to the corresponding article of the User Guide.  Below is the list of feature limitations. 

Backup and Replication

  • VMware VM RDM disks are supported only in virtual compatibility mode

  • Backed up RDM disks in virtual compatibility mode are recovered as thin disks

  • Replicas of VMs with RDM disks in virtual compatibility mode are created with thin disks

  • VMware VM Independent disks are not supported

  • A Transporter installed on Linux should be used to back up and replicate VMs with SATA disks

  • First Class Disk (FCD) cannot be backed up if it is not attached to any VM

  • VSS quiescing is not supported for encrypted VMs

  • VSS quiescing is not available for Microsoft Windows 7 on some platforms

  • Microsoft Windows 10 Pro does not support VSS quiescing on Microsoft Hyper-V 2012 R2

  • LVM logical volumes in a thin pool are not supported for physical backup jobs

  • Replication job fails if a datastore with a replica is renamed

  • An encrypted AWS EC2 instance (default key) can not be replicated between accounts

  • Backup of physical machines with Cluster Shared Volumes (CSV) is not supported.

  • Nutanix AHV disks belonging to Volume Groups are not supported for backup jobs

Skip Swap Files and Partitions

  • Windows dynamic disks are not supported

  • Physical machine backup is not supported

  • Linux swap in files currently is not skipped. Only Linux swap partitions are supported

vSphere Hot Add

  • If Hot Add cannot be enabled for at least one disk of a source VM (even if the disk is deselected in the job), Hot Add may be unavailable for all disks of the VM

  • Hot Add is not available for VMs that contain IDE disks

  • vSphere HotAdd is not supported if the VA with NAKIVO Backup & Replication has the same BIOS UUID as the source VM

Encrypted Repository

  • Encrypted repositories are not supported with RHEL/SLES due to missing required packages

Screenshot Verification

  • NFS datastores cannot be used as target datastores for screenshot verification

Pre and Post Job Actions

  • Application log truncation is not available on ESXi 4.1

  • PowerShell scripts are not supported for standalone jobs. All Windows scripts are being run by cmd.exe

Flash VM Boot

  • ESX/ESXi hosts enable binding the software iSCSI adapter (HBA) to VM Kernel network(s). If such binding is configured for an ESX/ESXi host that is used as a target for Flash VM Boot, the connectivity between the host and the Transporter might not be available at the iSCSI layer

  • If an iSCSI binding is configured for a host to be used as a target for Flash VM Boot, verify or configure the connectivity at the iSCSI layer (either by selecting a host without binding, removing binding on a host, or adding a dedicated VM Kernel network to the binding that allows the connectivity)

  • NFS datastores cannot be used as target datastores for flash VM boot

Recovery

  • File recovery from Linux LVM volumes is available only in case the Transporter assigned to the Backup Repository is installed on a Linux OS

  • File recovery is not supported for independent, encrypted, and RAID disks

  • File recovery from LVM volumes is not available if the Transporter that is assigned to a backup repository is installed on a NAS such as Synology, QNAP, Western Digital, or ASUSTOR 

  • File recovery from systems that use Windows-only features, such as Windows Data Deduplication or DFS, is available only in case the Transporter assigned to a backup repository is installed on Windows machine with such features enabled

  • File recovery is not supported for source VMs on RAID disks 

  • File recovery from Windows Dynamic Disks is not supported for the following platforms:

    • ASUSTOR NAS

    • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.x

  • Recovering files to an NFS share fails if the NFS server is configured as NFSv4 only and the NAKIVO Transporter has earlier NFS protocol versions

  • File recovery may skip empty folders from the NTFS file system in certain configurations

  • Active Directory printers are skipped during recovered items import

  • Replica/recovered VM disks are always created as Lazy zeroed if source VM had both Lazy and Eager zeroed disks

  • Exchange emails that were forwarded to recipient as attachments cannot be recovered from the mailbox

  • Exchange Public Folders are not supported for granular recovery

  • File recovery fails if the HDD's Virtual Device Node is SATA and Transporter proceeding the job is installed on Windows

  • SQL Server object recovery does not work with databases that have memory-optimized data filegroup containers

  • SQL Server object recovery cannot recover system-versioned table if the table with such name already exists

  • File recovery for thinly-provisioned logical volumes is not supported

  • File-level recovery may be unavailable on some Linux configurations with XFS or BTRFS file systems

  • PowerShell scripts are not supported for site recovery actions. All Windows scripts are being run by cmd.exe