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Has anyone had any experience of using Unitrends Enterprise Backup 8.2, hosted on a VM? (We’re currently on v8.2.0-7.201509281959)

We’ve been running UEB since December 2014 and although most of the time it works, every month or so we experience issues such as backups hanging, inability to login (stuck on “Authenticating…”), backups not running at their scheduled times, etc.

Our UEB virtual machine is on a Dell PowerEdge R520, running on Windows Server 2012 R2 Standard’s Hyper-V role.

We’ve had Unitrends support look into it, but they haven’t identified the cause. The “solution” - if you can call it that - is always to reboot the VM, which gets it going again but it’s a nuisance and doesn’t fill us with confidence.

What are your experiences with this product…? Could it be our specific hardware/network causing us issues, or do others find this product flaky?

2 Spice ups
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There’s lots and lots of people here on spiceworks using it happily and mostly they say that the support is good.

For my part I have tested it twice over the past few years and had issues out of the box. That was enough for me to stop testing and move on after throwing a few hours at it. YMMV. I’m sure that I could have worked with support and got Unitrends running satisfactorily, and it may have been that I was misconfiguring it (I was working straight from the product manual though).

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Matty - Thanks for using UEB.

I have a few questions for you -

  • Have you considered upgrading to version 9.0? As long as you’re up to date on support, which it sounds like you are, then this is free.
  • What kinds of clients are you protecting?
  • If using agents, are all of them up to date?

Thanks again for using Unitrends!

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Hi Katie

If it would fix the problems we’ve been having then yes - we’d gladly update to 9.0, but I would have thought that 8.x would be a mature, rock solid product by now since it’s being superseded by a newer major version?

The types of clients we’re protecting are Windows Server 2003/2008 physical and 2012 R2 Hyper-V and virtual machines.

All updates that were available on 13/10/2015 were installed. Since it’s a manual process, we don’t tend to keep re-visiting this on a regular basis. There are currently 16 updates available.

Unitrends support have recommended replacing the hard disks, which is nonsense, since the Hyper-V management partition and two other VM’s on that server aren’t reporting any issues and iDRAC hasn’t reported any issues with the RAID array.

Feeling very frustrated!

Thanks,

Matty.

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Matty - Thanks for those details.

8.2 was a very robust and developed version of our software, but as with any software, bugs may be discovered that require patches, and in terms of backup, updates from the OSs that we offer protection for may require updates to ensure that your backups are running smoothly. Anytime that we have a fix for an issue, we release a patch or new version. I’m not sure from your post above if your UEB is current, since it sounds like you may have 16 updates still available to download. If you still have 16 updates to complete, and your entire system isn’t on version 9.0, I would highly encourage you to complete these updates, and check any agents to make sure that they’re up to date as well to see if this remedies your issues before you begin to explore other options.

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Is version 9.0 available yet? I’ve installed all the updates, which takes us to version 8.2.0-8.201511091708, then checked for more updates and couldn’t find any further updates.

I’ve searched for information about upgrading to version 9, but I can’t find any instructions other than Unitrends | Unified Backup & Disaster Recovery You Can Rely On ; which directs me to check for updates within the UI, which I’ve done and it appears that it’s not possible to update to 9.0 in this way.

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Matty - Version 9.0 is being rolled out in waves, based on deployment type. Since you’re not seeing the update in your interface, you can contact support to ask them to push 9.0 out to you early. Until you receive the update, please make sure that your agents are also up to date., You can find all of the agent downloads here .

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Hi Katie

Support asked me to complete this form to gain early access to 9.0: http://go2.unitrends.com/Release9-EarlyAccess

Hopefully it won’t take too long to get the email!

Thanks,

Matty.

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Matty - I’m glad that they were able to get you sorted out. Another thing to check on is the resources that you’ve allocated to your UEB installation. Do you know where you stand on the following:

  • Full Backup Size
  • How many GBs of provisioned disk space do you have for UEB?
  • How many vCPUs do you have allocated to your UEB VM?
  • How many GBs of memory do you have allocated to your UEB installation?
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  • Full Backup Size: 986.45 GB (Capacity license for 1024 GB)

  • How many GBs of provisioned disk space do you have for UEB? 3,072 GB

  • How many vCPUs do you have allocated to your UEB VM?: 4 vCPU’s

  • How many GBs of memory do you have allocated to your UEB installation?: 12 GB

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Matty - It sounds like you have the right resources allocated to your installation, which is great! Sometimes the resources that people allocate to their UEB can limit its ability to perform, but that doesn’t sound like something that is affecting your installation. I would see how your UEB performs after the software updates. If you’re still having issues, it may be time to replace your hard disks to resolve any remaining issues.

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We ended up reinstalling UEB, with the help of Unitrends support. When we went to download the installer, to our surprise it was the 9.0 installer, not 8.2. So no need to wait to hear back about early access - the only installer available on Unitrends website at the moment is 9.0.

Hopefully the new installation will be more reliable than the original.

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Thanks for this update Matty! If you haven’t hear back from support in a few hours, please let me know.

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I am loathe to necropost, though it’s not too far out - I noticed this behavior on my old NFR copy of the UEB (Spicy Edition) where it would have these exact same issues after having a solid uptime. I’d also notice high CPU usage in VMware but RAM was relatively flat. Rebooting the VM often resolved the hanging and lack of GUI logins.

The free version (free-free?) hasn’t had these issues at all thus far.

Just getting it out there…

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Ben - Thanks for this post. If you’re wondering what version Ben’s referring to, it’s our Unitrends Free, which can be found here .

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Just catching up on my virtualization readings, but as a moderator, we use a general guideline as necroposting being 6 months to a year and we consider other factors as well. Don’t fear, if we consider it to be a necro, you’ll know.

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