Why do i need scAgent for vmware plugin?

[magnus_nyvall]

I cant find it in documentation.

Why is it needed? Does it not use vsphere API?

How do i install an agent when using vcenter virtual appliance (vsphere 5.1 on suse 64-bit)?

[ktenzer]

The plugins are part of the agent so no agent = no plugins.

In SC 3.x we used to have a built in local agent which would bypass our real agent if you didnt want to use one, however since we moved to java this is no longer possible so as of 4.0 an agent is required to do anything with a plugin.

We are coming out with a new agent in SC 4.1 which is built for scalability, the 4.0 agent is same agent we always had which works great but it is only single threaded. Meaning you can only do one backup at a time, if you get multiple parallel backups things wont work well. If this is case you probably should stay on SC 3.6P1 until SC 4.1 is available due to restriction in 4.0 of having the agent.

Regards,

Keith

[magnus_nyvall]

Where should it be installed? On vcenter? Or somewhere else?

Because it cannot be installed on the virtual appliance vcenter.

ERROR: Detected a Snap Creator agent running on 9090! Please stop agent before running setup!

netstat -a | grep 9090 finds nothing so this seems to not work.

Also am I understanding it correctly that in 4.1 the agent will not be needed?

Regards Magnus

[ktenzer]

On any host that has access to vCenter. The scAgent checks if the port is open so not sure what is happening there but all the agent setup does is allow you to accept license and configures start script.

You can touch a file called "LICENSE" in scAgent root dir and then update path in bin/scAgent start script. The you should be able to start agent. This is workaround if you arent able to figure out this issue.

Keith

[magnus_nyvall]

The big issue is that we need an agent at all to be honest.

This pretty much disqualifies it.

Also we managed to start agent manually but now we get Autodiscovery failed.

The datastore is in a vfiler but that is not accesible form SC server because its on a non routed storage network.

Is that the problem here?

Regards Magnus

[ktenzer]

The issue I am thinking is the plugin makes some ZAPI calls to storage so the agent/plugin must be installed somewhere where that can happen. However this is no different than previous versions of SC. The only difference is the agent is running as a daemon, that is it. The agent can be installed on same server as SC server.

Regards,

Keith

[magnus_nyvall]

Ahh that makes sense actually. so wee need the agent on a host that can communicate with the vfiler on our storage lan.

Since DFM proxy is dimmed out for virtualization plugin.

Regards Magnus

[ktenzer]

Yeah the plugin has to figure out where a datastore is mapped to etc, so it must communicate with storage.

In future we are going to make this easier and everything will go through SC Server and not from plugin to storage. It is just the vmware plugin that does this.

Keith