bareos-fd-vmware : dependencies / python version

[Arnaud WILLEM]

Hello all,

I'm currently trying out and installing Bareos 22 on a Debian 11 distribution (getting ready for the Debian 12 release shortly.)

All is working well, after a few updates and tweaks related to the python version (backported python 3.11 from testing.)

We are, however, stuck with a problem using pyVmomi and the bareos-fd-vmware plugin.

While connexion, backup and VM disk handling are fine, we keep receiving the following error message : 

09-Jun 11:07 vmware JobId 38: Error: python3-fd-mod: Failed to transform VM >redacted VM name< metadata: Error: Unknown Device
Type vim.vm.device.VirtualSerialPort, recreating this VM will not be possible!

I've tried every possible combination of pyVmomi version / python release and Bareos package release and it seems to appear every time; using the same package version/releases on Ubuntu 22 *doesn't* show this error ...

The easy answer is : use Ubuntu, however this is not supported at the moment as bareos is running on physical server using Debian.

Is this error a know issue or limitation ? What could explain the different behaviour from one distro to the other ?

Thanks in advance if you have some feedback on this particular issue,

Arnaud

[Stephan Duehr]

Hello,

looking at the plugin code

https://github.com/bareos/bareos/blob/6c6568cd8b022c48429f8465b6d82a0bc5df50c0/core/src/plugins/filed/python/vmware/BareosFdPluginVMware.py#L3202-L3206

the cause is that vim.vm.device.VirtualSerialPort is currently not covered by the plugin.

So this does not depend on the operating system or pyVmomi version.

The only logic reason that it did not work for you on Debian but worked on Ubuntu can be simply that you did not
backup a VM which had a VirtualSerialPort configured at that time, otherwise it would have thrown that error on any system
and any pyVmomi version.

Regards,

Stephan

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[Arnaud WILLEM]

Hello Stephan,

thanks for your detailed answer.

It seems the VMs created with the Terraform vSphere provider always include this VirtualSerialPort, others created manually do not.

As far as I can see, the plugin's code is "merely" glue code to pyVmomi when restoring, right ? Fixing this would only need to add the correct processing code for this particular device type ?

If there's no work in progress on this, I'll try to propose a patch/PR.

BR,

Arnaud Willem