v10.5 Release Notes

Release Date: 16 November 2021

New Features

VMware Monitoring 

This feature allows you to track the CPU, memory, and disk load/usage for VMware vSphere hosts and VMs. NAKIVO Backup & Replication can also monitor disk usage for VMware vSphere datastores.

Hardened Virtual Appliance

This functionality allows you to create immutable backups in Backup Repositories deployed as part of a virtual appliance. The immutability cannot be unset by any user or process. This provides an additional level of security for your backups.

Auto-Set API Permissions for Microsoft 365 Accounts

NAKIVO Backup & Replication can now automatically check and set the required API permissions for Microsoft 365 accounts before adding them to Inventory.

Backup of VM Templates

NAKIVO Backup & Replication can now back up and recover custom VM templates to and from VMware vCenter or ESXi hosts.

General Tab Facelift

This update also brings a new, more intuitive user interface to the General tab in Settings.

Improvements

  • The solution can now display full license information, including full licensing model breakdown and used/licensed workload details.

  • More consistent format for alarms and notifications.

  • Improved two-factor authentication for Active Directory users.

  • Improved tree UI component for easier management of large item sets.

  • Backup copy jobs now skip data unpack/pack if the source and target Backup Repository share the same type and compression.

  • The solution more easily identifies backups with corrupted recovery points.

  • Enhanced tracking of virtual machines in Microsoft Hyper-V clusters during job runs.

  • Data unpack is now skipped for new backup copy jobs. A mapping run is required to apply the improvement for existing backup copy jobs.

  • Support for Asustor ADM 4.0.
  • VMware Virtual Appliance and Nutanix AHV Virtual Appliance are now based on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS.
  • Transporters can now be grouped into transporterpools. If this option is selected during the job creation process, only the transporters that belong to the selected transporter pool shall be used during the job run. This can be useful for allocating resources of the specific transporters to the job.

Known Issues

Product Usability

  • You may be unable to update from NAKIVO Backup & Replication v7.2 and older due to missing information in old licenses. Please contact support@nakivo.com to obtain an updated license.

  • It is possible to downgrade the Western Digital NAS package to an older version, which can lead to lost product configuration.

  • When selecting all NAKIVO Backup & Replication users to apply a bulk action, only the users displayed on the screen are selected.

  • When updating NAKIVO Backup & Replication to v10.0, all logos will be updated with the NAKIVO default logo, including customized logos.

  • NAKIVO Backup & Replication may not display the up-to-date size of a SaaS Backup Repository immediately.

Platform Limitations

Windows

  • If a Transporter is installed on Windows Server 2008R2 or later, it is recommended that you set SAN Policy to OfflineShared or OfflineAll.

  • File recovery may fail if the HDD’s virtual device node is SATA and the Transporter processing the job is installed on Windows.

  • Connection with the Transporter on a Windows 10 physical machine will be lost when it goes into sleep mode or restarts after installing system updates.

  • Microsoft Windows 10 Pro does not support VSS quiescing on Microsoft Hyper-V 2012 R2.

  • If an NFS share Backup Repository is created on Windows OS and has Transporter installed on a Windows OS assigned to it, this repository may become inaccessible after some time. This occurs due to the Windows-specific share permission configuration issue.

NAS

  • Onboard Transporters installed on NAS devices with ARM CPU do not support VMware infrastructures.

  • SAN transport mode doesn’t work when NAKIVO Backup & Replication is running on a QNAP NAS.

  • Transporters running on FreeNAS devices are not supported for backup and recovery of VMware vSphere VMs.

VMware

  • VMware vSphere Transporter appliance cannot be deployed to ESXi older than 5.1.

  • VMware VM independent disks are not supported.

  • For successful replication and recovery to an NFS datastore, thin-provisioned disks should be created.

  • Free ESXi host v7.0.2 with SSH connection enabled may not be discoverable due to unsupported SSH server algorithms. For details, refer to Free ESXi Host Cannot Be Discovered.

Hyper-V

  • CBT Driver for Microsoft Hyper-V 2012(R2) is not available.

  • Hyper-V on Windows Nano Server cannot be added to NAKIVO Backup & Replication Inventory.

  • If the same Microsoft Hyper-V VM is processed by multiple jobs simultaneously, some of the jobs may fail to create a VM checkpoint.

  • Issues with Integration Services for Ubuntu 12.04 Server (x64) and SLES 11 SP3/SP4 (x64) prevent connection to source VMs running on Hyper-V.

  • Recovery jobs for Microsoft Hyper-V do not allow creating VMs with identical names.

Nutanix

  • Nutanix volume groups are not supported by NAKIVO Backup & Replication.
  • Application aware mode is not supported for Windows Server 2022 running on Nutanix.

AWS

  • Application-aware processing for Amazon EC2 may freeze when using domain credentials.

  • The Failback EC2 Instances action with the Original Location option selected turns off the source instance instead of terminating it.

  • Backup of encrypted EBS volumes may be unavailable for certain Amazon EC2 Transporter instance types.

  • Replica AMIs and recovered Amazon EC2 instances have "Platform" attribute set to "Other Linux" due to AWS API limitations.

  • Bandwidth Throttling cannot be applied to instance backups to local Amazon EC2 Regions with a single Transporter.

  • AWS accounts in China (Beijing and Ningxia regions) and Asia-Pacific (Osaka-local) are not supported.

Microsoft 365

  • Backup and recovery of Exchange Online guest mailboxes, public folder mailboxes, online archive folders, calendars added from Directory, read-only calendars, distribution groups, resource mailboxes, event messages (that is, "#microsoft.graph.eventMessageRequest", "#microsoft.graph.eventMessage"), security groups, and outbox folders are not supported.

  • Exchange Online contact and calendar items can only be recovered to the original mailbox.

  • Backup and recovery of OneDrive for Business items such as "Shared" folder, "Recent" folder, "Recycle bin", Internal OneDrives or folders are not supported.

  • Backup and recovery of SharePoint Online items such as internal folders, internal document libraries, internal lists, and internal list items are not supported.

  • Backup and recovery of SharePoint Online items such as MicroFeed lists, picture library, site assets library, and site pages library are not supported.

  • Backup and recovery of SharePoint Online external users and version history are not supported.

  • Recovery of SharePoint Online lists containing lookup data to a different site is not supported.

  • The lookup data of SharePoint Online lists displayed in the recovery wizard is inaccurate, and it can’t be recovered.

  • Recovery of SharePoint Online lists containing special characters/symbols is not supported.

  • Backup and recovery of Microsoft 365 Groups and Teams are not supported.

  • ARMv7-based NAS devices and FreeNAS are not supported for SaaS Backup Repository creation.

  • Backup copy jobs are not supported for Microsoft 365.

  • Recovery is not supported for files and folders that have names exceeding 128 characters and for full file paths exceeding 260 characters. Note that URL encoded characters count as 3 characters for the purpose of reaching these limits.

Amazon S3 and Wasabi

  • Features that use iSCSI (that is, Flash VM Boot, screenshot verification, file-level recovery, recovery to source) may not work with Amazon S3 and Wasabi Backup Repositories due to the networking requirements limitation.

Integration

  • Active Directory integration with NAKIVO Backup & Replication is not supported for guest user accounts.

  • HPE StoreOnce Catalyst integration is not supported on devices with ARM7 and ARM64 (AArch64) processors.

Reliability

  • With backup copy jobs, the value of the job speed on the dashboard can differ from the value provided via the Bandwidth Throttling settings.

  • When restarting a recovered VM with dynamic disks mounted to a Transporter, dynamic disks may not be recognized.

  • VMs that were recovered from encrypted source VMs with NVRAM settings modified may fail to boot.

  • Authentication to Active Directory using NTLMv2 cannot be performed.

  • Deployment of source Transporter and source VM from the same Windows VM template may cause backup corruption in HotAdd mode.

  • When refreshing an Amazon S3 Backup Repository with immutable data, an alarm notifying about corrupted data in the repository may not be displayed in the product.

Feature Limitations

NAKIVO Backup & Replication features require certain conditions to function properly. For more details about feature requirements, refer to the corresponding articles in the User Guide. Below is a list of feature limitations. 

Backup and Replication

  • VMware VM RDM disks are supported only in virtual compatibility mode.

  • Backed-up RDM disks in virtual compatibility mode are recovered as thin disks.

  • Replicas of VMs with RDM disks in virtual compatibility mode are created with thin disks.

  • First Class Disks (FCDs) cannot be backed up if they are not attached to any VMs.

  • VSS quiescing is not supported for encrypted VMs.

  • VSS quiescing is not available for Microsoft Windows 7 on some platforms.

  • LVM logical volumes in a thin pool are not supported for physical backup jobs.

  • An encrypted Amazon EC2 instance (default key) can not be replicated between accounts.

  • Replication across different AWS account types is not supported.

  • Cluster Shared Volumes (CSV) are not supported for backup of physical systems.

  • Windows failover clusters are not supported for backup of physical systems.

  • Backup and replication of Microsoft Hyper-V VMs with shared drives are not supported.

  • Linux Transporter should be used for replicating/backing up VMs with SATA disks.

  • When copying a compressed backup between a Backup Repository and tape device, different compression levels may cause very slow transfer speeds. For more information, see this article.

Exclude Swap Files and Partitions

  • Windows dynamic disks are not supported.

  • Physical machine backup is not supported.

  • Linux swap files are currently not excluded. Only Linux swap partitions are supported.

vSphere HotAdd

  • If HotAdd cannot be enabled for at least one disk of a source VM (even if the disk is deselected in the job), HotAdd may be unavailable for all disks of the VM.

  • HotAdd is not available for VMs that contain IDE disks.

  • VMware vSphere HotAdd is not supported if the VA with NAKIVO Backup & Replication has the same BIOS UUID as the source VM.

Encrypted Repository

  • Encrypted repositories are not supported with RHEL/SLES due to missing required packages.

Screenshot Verification

  • NFS datastores cannot be used as target datastores for screenshot verification.

Log Truncation

  • Application log truncation is not available on ESXi 4.1.

Pre and Post Job Actions

  • PowerShell scripts are not supported for standalone jobs. All Windows scripts are run by cmd.exe.

  • Custom pre/post-job scripts are unavailable for Windows VMs when Integration Services are used on Hyper-V 2016 and above.

Flash VM Boot

  • ESX/ESXi hosts enable binding the software iSCSI adapter (HBA) to VM Kernel network(s). If such binding is configured for an ESX/ESXi host that is used as a target for Flash VM Boot, the connectivity between the host and the Transporter might not be available at the iSCSI layer.

  • If an iSCSI binding is configured for a host to be used as a target for Flash VM Boot, verify or configure the connectivity at the iSCSI layer (either by selecting a host without binding, removing binding on a host, or adding a dedicated VM Kernel network to the binding that allows the connectivity).

  • NFS datastores cannot be used as target datastores for Flash VM Boot.

  • VM templates are not supported for the Flash VM Boot.

File-Level Recovery

  • File recovery from Linux LVM volumes is available only when the Transporter assigned to the Backup Repository is installed on a Linux OS.

  • File recovery is not supported for independent, encrypted, and RAID disks.

  • File recovery from LVM volumes is not available when the Transporter that is assigned to a Backup Repository is installed on a NAS such as Synology, QNAP, Western Digital, or ASUSTOR.

  • File recovery from systems that use Windows-only features, such as Windows Data Deduplication or DFS, is available only when the Transporter assigned to a Backup Repository is installed on a Windows machine with these features enabled.

  • File recovery is not supported for source VMs on RAID disks. 

  • File recovery from Windows Dynamic Disks is not supported for the following platforms:

    • ASUSTOR NAS

    • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.x

  • Recovering files to an NFS share fails if the NFS server is configured as NFSv4 only, and the Transporter has earlier NFS protocol versions.

  • File recovery may skip empty folders from the NTFS file system in certain configurations.

  • File recovery fails if the HDD's virtual device node is SATA, and the Transporter processing the job is installed on Windows

  • File recovery for thin provisioned logical volumes is not supported.

  • File recovery may be unavailable on some Linux configurations with XFS or BTRFS file systems.

  • File recovery is not possible if a backup contains an incomplete set of disks that are a part of the spanned volume/dynamic disks/LVM/RAID software or any other disk structures.

  • File recovery may fail if the Windows machine to which you wish to recover items has over 20 disk volumes (with and without drive letters).

  • File recovery may fail to display the contents of disks containing over 1 million files.

  • Symlinks in Windows and Linux OS, as well as encrypted files, are not supported for file recovery.

  • VM templates are not supported for file and object recovery.

  • Recovery to source for Windows is not possible if the file path, folder path, file name length, or folder name length exceeds 256 characters.

Object-Level Recovery

  • Active Directory printers are skipped during the import of recovered items.

  • Replica/recovered VM disks are always created as lazy zeroed if the source VM has both lazy and eager zeroed disks.

  • Microsoft Exchange emails that were forwarded to a recipient as attachments cannot be recovered from the mailbox.

  • Microsoft Exchange public folders are not supported for granular recovery.

  • Microsoft SQL Server object recovery does not work with databases that have memory-optimized data filegroup containers.

  • Microsoft SQL Server object recovery cannot recover a system-versioned table if another table with the same name already exists.

  • Recovery of mailboxes is not supported for Microsoft Exchange object recovery jobs.

  • Birthday events may not be recovered via an object recovery job for Microsoft Exchange even if the job run was successful.

  • Microsoft Exchange contact and calendar items are not supported for downloading to a browser or forwarding via email (Expert Mode).

  • Recovery of DNS entries is not supported for Active Directory.

Cross-Platform Recovery

  • Cross-platform recovery may not work if a VM or physical machine includes a special OS kernel.

Site Recovery

  • PowerShell scripts are not supported for Site Recovery actions. All Windows scripts are run by cmd.exe.

Direct Connect

  • Recovery to source, object recovery, universal object recovery, backup export, Multi-Channel Recovery, Re-IP, log truncation, tape support, and Site Recovery are not supported with Direct Connect.

  • vSphere tags support is not available via Direct Connect.

Users And Roles

  • If role-based access control (RBAC) is not available for the currently installed NAKIVO Backup & Replication license, creating additional users and roles is not possible.

Backup Immutability

  • When refreshing an Amazon S3 Backup Repository with immutable data, an alarm notifying about corrupted data in the repository may not be displayed in the product.

  • Backup Immutability is not supported for encrypted Backup Repositories.

Miscellaneous

  • The XFS filesystem is not supported for recovery to source.

  • Bandwidth Throttling is not available for recovery from tape jobs.

  • For SaaS Backup Repositories, recovery point statistics are returned only if the recovery point version is higher than v10.3.