ESX Ranger, ESX, Netapp, NFS

If you have ESX running on Netapp, you sure as hell probably installed the Netapp ESX tools. If you didnt then you should. A couple things that the tools do is change NFS settings within ESX.

I ran into an issue with ESX Ranger failing on backups from Netapp NFS to a Netapp CIFS share. The error was:

The Backup file /vmfs/volumes/NFS_TIER_BLAH/Server1//Server1-flat.vmdk that was transfered appears to be Invalid! Transfered Size: 112546265463, Expected Size: 94667312308.

The solution seems to be changing the NFS timeout values within ESX by:

Changing the value of NFS.HeartbeatFrequency to 12
Changing the value of NFS.HeartbeatMaxFailures to 10

This will work for most people if they havent already installed the Netapp tools and therefore already have these settings. This didnt fix my problem, but it may yours.

My solution was to Use NFS instead of CIFS for the target. It works thus far.

Sean