SLES VMware VM fail to bootup after restored from Veritas NetBackup

This document (7018082) is provided subject to the disclaimer at the end of this document.

Environment

SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 12

Veritas NetBackup 7.7.3

VMware ESX 5.5 U3

Situation

After restoring a SLES VM using Veritas NetBackup 7.7.3 tool in ESX 5.5 U3, the VM fails to bootup.

The following error messages is seen in the console:

Warning: /dev/disk/by-uuid/df820f18-f922-477a-b6c8-1e69e8139d95 does not exist
Warning: Boot has failed. To debug this issue add "rd.shell rd.debug" to the kernel command line.

Resolution

This is a Veritas NetBackup issue. A workaround is to boot the restored VM in Rescue Mode and reconfigure the swap partition.

The following is an outline of the workaround.
Perform a Chroot Installed System (CIS) Procedure to find out the UUID of the swap partition in "/etc/fstab" so that we can reconfigure the swap partition.

1. Boot the VM from the SLES installation DVD.

2. Select Rescue System.
Type "root" at the Rescue login prompt.

3. Determine the device that contains the root / partition so that we can see "/etc/fstab".
   Use "cat /proc/partitions" or "parted -l" commands to help you list all the devices.
   For example, to check whether the root partition is in "/dev/sda2":
   # mount /dev/sda2 /mnt
   # ls -l /mnt
   If the directories "/mnt/etc" and "/mnt/root" are listed, then "/dev/sda2" is the root partition.
   If it is not the root partition, then unmount it:
   # umount /mnt
   Repeat these steps for each partition until you found the root.

4. Mount the root partition to "/mnt":
# mount /dev/sda2 /mnt

5. Rebind the "/proc", "/sys" and "/dev" filesystems:
   # mount --rbind /proc /mnt/proc
   # mount --rbind /sys /mnt/sys
   # mount --rbind /dev /mnt/dev

6. Chroot to the mounted root file system and mount all the remaining file systems:
# chroot /mnt
# mount -a

7. Find out the UUID of the swap partition using "more /etc/fstab" command.
E.g.:
UUID=df820f18-f922-477a-b6c8-1e69e8139d95 swap swap defaults 0 0

6. Determine the swap partition from "fdisk -l" or "parted -l" command:
Note that a swap partition has type Id of 82.
For example, lets assume the swap partition is in "/dev/sda1".

7. Setup swap partition using the same swap partition UUID as in "/etc/fstab":
# mkswap -U df820f18-f922-477a-b6c8-1e69e8139d95 /dev/sda1

8. Enable swap on the swap partition:
# swapon /dev/sda1

9. Unmount and exit:
# umount -a
# exit

10. Restart the VM.
The restored VM should be able to bootup successfully.

Cause

The root cause of this issue is that the linux swap partition is disabled after the Veritas NetBackup restore operation.
This is a known issue as documented in the following Veritas article "Linux swap partition is disabled after VMware Virtual Machine restore":
https://www.veritas.com/support/en_US/article.000023097

Disclaimer

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