Note the following about the hotadd transport mode:

• The VMware backup host must be installed in a virtual machine.

• The following is a VMware requirement: The virtual machine to back up and the virtual machine that contains the hotadd backup host must reside in the same VMware datacenter. The same VMware requirement applies to virtual machine restore: The virtual machine to restore and the virtual machine that contains the hotadd restore host must reside in the same VMware datacenter.

  For hotadd backup, Veritas recommends at least one hotadd backup host for each datacenter.

• NetBackup does not support IDE disks on the virtual machine.

• On the virtual machine to back up, no two disks should have the same name. (Identical names can occur if the disks reside on different datastores.)

• The ESX server (where the backup-host virtual machine resides) must have access to the datastore of the virtual machines that you want to back up.

• The datastore for the backup-host virtual machine must have some free space before the hotadd backup begins. Otherwise, the backup may fail.

• Restores that use the hotadd or SAN transport modes do not include the VM's metadata changes in the restore. The status log of the NetBackup job contains messages similar to the following:

  07/25/2013 12:37:29 - Info tar (pid=16257) INF - Transport Type
  = hotadd
  07/25/2013 12:42:41 - Warning bpbrm (pid=20895) from client
  <client_address>: WRN - Cannot set metadata (key:geometry.
  biosSectors, value:62) when using san or hotadd transport.

  As a workaround, retry the restore with a different transport mode (nbd or nbdssl).

  This problem is a known VMware issue. For more details, see the VMware VDDK 6.0 release notes.

• Locking timeouts in the VMware VDDK may cause simultaneous hotadd backups from the same VMware backup host to fail.

  See Simultaneous hotadd backups (from the same VMware backup host) fail with status 13.

• On a Windows Server backup host (proxy) with the hotadd transport mode, set the Windows SAN policy to onlineAll.

  For more information on hotadd, see the following article:

  VMware Transport Modes: Best practices and troubleshooting

• For a list of VMware restrictions on the hotadd transport mode, refer to VMware's documentation. For example:

  VMware VDDK 6.0 release notes