TSM VE - Invalid Disk while Mounting Dynamic Disk via iSCSI

[Dave-s1k]

I currently have a PMR open for this issue, but IBM apparently has not seen this issue besides one other customer. The resolution for that customer did not fix our issue, so I've posted here to see if anyone else may have seen this problem.

A little information about our environment.

We are testing TSM VE in one of our data centers. We are running VMWare Vcenter 5.5, and TSM server is at 7.1.0.0. We are able to back up a VM without a problem. When we want to do a file level restore is when we run into issues. Most of our disks for our VM's are Basic disk for the C:\ and Dynamic disk for any other drives D:\, etc. When we try mounting the Basic Disk via iSCSI within the DP Recovery Agent, the disk is visible in the Windows Disk Manager and we can browse the volume just fine. When we attempt to mount the Dynamic disk via iSCSI within DP Recovery Agent, the disk is in an 'offline' state within Windows Disk Manager. When we attempt to bring the disk 'online', we are then presented with an 'invalid' state and are unable to do anything with the disk. IBM has mentioned to mount all the dynamic disks for the VM in order to correct the issue. However, in our case we only have 1 dynamic disk for that specific VM. We have attempted to mount both the Basic Disk and Dynamic disk via iSCSI, but we were left with the same results; Basic disk good and Dyanmic Disk invalid.

Now if we try another VM with 1 Basic Disk and 1 Dynamic Disk we are left with the same results, so it isn't a VM thing.

Has anyone seen this before? Any help would be greatly appreciated.

 

[Dave-s1k]

I guess no one has seen this either?

 

[rowl]

Are you connecting the disk back to the original VM or to a different one? I seem to recall reading about a problem trying to mount a snapshot of a dynamic disk back to the original owner.
-Rowl

 

[Dave-s1k]

I've attempted both without any difference. Still presented with an 'invalid' disk.

 

[Erwan]

I'm experiencing the exact same behaviour. Did you manage to resolve it ? (or could you send me the related PMR number in mp) ?

Thanks,

Erwan

 

[Dave-s1k]

So IBM was no help, and the PMR even reached the Dev team. They wanted to point the finger to Microsoft and offered to open a ticket with Microsoft. However,I figured out the issue before it got that far.

I first wanted to eliminate VMWare from the equation. I installed the DP Recovery Agent on my local machine and tried mounting the problematic dynamic disks via iSCSI. It worked! In Windows Disk Manager it gave me a status of 'foreign disk' which I was able to import and the disk became available. I was able to browse freely just as expected.

So what it came down to? Our VM template. We use the same Windows 2008 R2 template for all our VMs including our Storage Proxy server. This caused problems due to the Disk IDs are all the same on all servers for the dynamic disks causing the invalid disk when trying to mount the VE snapshots. I was able to change the Disk ID for our D:\ on the Storage Proxy server and I'm now able to mount all dynamic disk successfully.