WhiteHatTechs

So to start with, I'd like to make it clear that I'm a Backup Admin by profession, NOT a VMware Admin. I have managed VMware systems previously, and am VCP certified on multiple versions but it is not my day-to-day job. I developed an interest in VMware back when I was a tech support engineer for a company and needed a reliable system to allow me to run multiple operating systems for testing purposes. Dual booting with GRUB, while it would work, was not convienent. Enter GSX. This little application, alone with VMware Server met my needs and sparked my curiosity. After a couple of years in support, I eventually moved on to a regular Backup Admin job, which reduced my normal day to day exposure to VMware. I worked in that role for a couple of years, eventually deploying my first VCB deployment, bringing VMware back into my daily operations. Time passes. Job ends. Now I'm in the job market with a very specialized career direction (backups). While job hunting, I decided it w

Recently ran into an issue with NetBackup while selecting a VM that was powered off. As this was a one off situation I created a new policy and manually selected only the VM. Set other values as expected, but when I ran the backup I received a status 4239 when at the snapshot phase. I attempted to remove and re-add the VM with no luck. I also turned off quiescing, changed transport mode, and modified other settings trying to determine the root cause. Come to find out, the issue was the result of the "Primary VM identifier". It was set to the default, which was "VM hostname". This requires information provided by VMware Tools, which are not running obviously on a powered down VM. Selection options available as identifiers are: VM hostname VM display name VM BIOS UUID VM DNS Name VM instance UUID Both the "VM hostname" and "VM DNS Name" require VMware tools to be running. You also don't want to use "VM BIOS UUID" as there c