Hey Edward,
apologies for the delay, I'm on vacation time now, but at times I try to catch up for a few hours. So:
A3. I had the same error, the issue was fixed by chmod ding the server-side folder perms. Same thing happened to a customer of hours, he said his NFS win2008 export had server-side issues with permissions, but he never followed up explaining which in detail. Anyhow, re: nfs on linux, here's how I created one for my lab, just FYI:
root@zcs7-multi-ldap:~# aptitude install nfs-kernel-server nfs-common portmap
root@zcs7-multi-ldap:~# mkdir /var/nfs
root@zcs7-multi-ldap:~# chown nobody:nogroup /var/nfs
root@zcs7-multi-ldap:~# mkdir /var/nfs/hdata /var/nfs/hdata2 /var/nfs/hdata-1
root@zcs7-multi-ldap:~# chmod a+w -R /var/nfs
root@zcs7-multi-ldap:~# chown -R nobody:nogroup /var/nfs
root@zcs7-multi-ldap:~# vi /etc/exports
root@zcs7-multi-ldap:~# grep -v '^#' /etc/exports
/var/nfs/hdata 192.168.254.104(rw,sync,no_subtree_check)
/var/nfs/hdata2 192.168.254.106(rw,sync,no_subtree_check)
/var/nfs/hdata-1 192.168.254.106(rw,sync,no_subtree_check)
root@zcs7-multi-ldap:~# exportfs -a
B3. Just got word, engineering spotted the issue, and it'll be fixed in our next release, thanks for the heads up Edward.
C4. The data-va uses mysql for metadatas. In any case both databases are on VMs having vmware tools installed, and any vsphere backup solution from third parties command the quiescing via the tools when backing up for consistency. About the better docs, as mentioned the detailed steps are to be found in the 3rd party backup software docs and support, since backing up Horizon is actually like backing up a normal vapp, and the extra steps is just to take a point in time backup of the NFS data-va volumes (if any) and the external postgresql (again, if not internal) at the same time the vapp is being saved. Still, we are collecting user experiences on this according to the tools our customers use to backup, and we'll potentially think on writing more detailed docs with certain vendors when we'll see users requests are sufficiently high. Thanks for the feedback on this Edward.
C5. Applications never install constantly fed files on directories outside the usuals Windows reserves for such (appdata, %TEMP%, etc). But at worst, in case anybody would manually do that, the setting re: limiting the versions on file would prevent such situation. And yes, for the moment there is a new copy every version made. Generally speaking it's however absolutely recommended that administrators enforce that files in horizon folder to be static (and we never had a single feedback so far were users would have by the way).
Back to vacation Edward, I'll talk to you soon! Ciao and thanks!
Marcello