i was able to deploy the VDP appliance after upgrading the majority of the ESX(i) hosts to 5.1. ESX 4.1 hosts are supported, but to deploy the 2TB version of VDP you need a datastore that’s actually a little over 3TB in size. the ability to create datastores >2TB debuts with ESXi 5.1.

after deploying it and powering it on, i used the https://vdp:8543/vdp-configure URL to initially set up the appliance. it seems like they really want you to set up a dedicated service account for VDP so i did so in AD. the configuration takes a good while to apply once you complete the wizard. also booting up this appliance in general seems to take a considerable amount of time.

after the deployment finished, i was looking around the vsphere client wondering where VDP was. i couldn’t find it so i skimmed through the documentation and found that it’s only accessible form the vsphere web client.

the good news is that the layout of the VDP UI is very similar to VDR, so there’s not much to relearn. one glaring shortcoming of VDP is that you can’t choose which vmdks to include/exclude, you can only choose whole VMs to back up. this feature will show up in VDP 5.5 apparently.

i stumbled upon a method to migrate VDR data to VDP. i was really excited about this and began the process. unfortunately, this process only migrates your backups and not your backup jobs. also this data migration takes an extremely long time. the migration process has been running for nearly a week and it’s still sitting at 10% done (about 21 VM backups migrated so far). initially, i ran into a problem attaching the VDR appliance to the VDP migration app. this is a known issue that can be resolved by renaming the VDR appliance to a name without spaces such as VDR01 (source: kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=2052476). also the VDP migration URL for future reference is https://vdp:8543/vdp-migration.

update/final thoughts 12/6/2013:
the VDR-to-VDP migration pretty much wrapped up around 8 days. the migration task hung at 90% for about 2 days even though it looked like all migration activity was complete. perhaps it was waiting for the VDR appliance to be detached. i’m fairly uncertain on what held up the task because i lost network connectivity to the web session of “vdp-migration”. it looks like once you’ve closed out that session you can’t get back into it. checking the VDP appliance’s logs (/usr/local/avamar/var/vdp-migration/server_logs) revealed no activity. i ended up simply canceling the migration task and then disabling the VDR plugin and deleting the VDR appliance. the migration process successfully migrated 94 backups and failed on 45 backups. that’s around a 68% success rate. the majority of the backups that failed seemed to be VMs with multiple disk drives.

quick update 12/9/2013:
to initially get the maintenance services running you’ll need to access the “vdp-configure” URL and go to Status and start the maintenance services.

vdp info:
http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=2016565
http://blogs.vmware.com/vsphere/2013/04/vdp-5-1-10-ga.html

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