Now the actual reason for this post is to make a note (mostly for my own reference) regarding a technical issue that I ran into during my esXpress testing. The issue relates to File Level Recovery (FLR) using the esXpress DeDupe appliance. When trying to do a FLR from a backed up VMDK with Reiserfs file systems that were created on VMs running Suse Linux Enterprise Server 10, the DeDupe appliance crashes with a “kernel panic” fatal error. I have flagged this up with PHD Virtual Support and they came back with the following statement:

The commit i/o error on ext3 is working as designed.  That is the ext3 filesystem trying to replay the journal and we are not allowing it as this would be modifying your backed up data.  The issue with reiserfs appears to be the exact same thing, except that the kernel is crashing rather than handling the error gracefully like ext3 does.  Technically, this is a bug in reiserfs.  That said, we are working on a solution to resolve this issue.

For updates on the issue, refer to the following thread:

http://www.phdvirtual.com/forums?func=view&catid=13&id=1604#1604