Setup
Using vCenter and ESX 4.1, we installed VMware Data Recovery 2.0 using two appliances.
Once appliance has a single 1TB (892GB free) destination on a mapped raw iSCSI LUN.
The other appliance has two 500GB (440 and 450GB free) destinations on CIFS shares to two Windows 2003 servers.
The virtual machines to be backed up are on a 1.9TB (1.3TB free) VMFS iSCSI LUN.
The iSCSI network is segregated from the vConsole network, and routing between them is not possible. Name resolution for the ESX hosts works from the Data Recovery appliance VM, and vice versa.
Issue
We configured a daily backup job on 10/21 and set it running.
It ran correctly every day, although there were occasional error -3948 (vcb api exception) messages, though running the backups again would be successful.
Everything was fine until 11/4, on which every backup job failed with error -3902 (file access error). Since then, no job has completed--all jobs fail with the same error.
Status
Both appliances show the same issue starting on the same day: no backups are being made to any destination.
VM snapshots can be created and deleted manually, and no delta files are present in any VM folders.
The vmware.log for each VM shows that a snapshot was created successfully, and then immediately removed.
VMs newly added to the existing backup jobs show the same behavior.
New backup jobs show the same behavior.
All destination datastores pass integrity checks.
Creating a new CIFS datastore shows the same behavior.
Creating a new ESXi 4.1 trial version (fully licensed) server using local disk datastore, creating a new VM, and creating a new backup job, shows the same behavior.
No (known or intentional) configuration changes were made.
Additional oddities
Rebooting one of the two DR VMs caused its IP address to revert to DHCP, and all destination, backup job, and configuration information was lost and had to be re-input.
Question
What does error -3902 (file access error) mean? I.E. what file, from where?
What else should we look at? Are there more detailed logs somewhere?
Does anybody have DR working successfully?
I strongly suggest you engage VMWare directly. You might also post this on the VMWare Community Boards for a response.