Below are the minimum required vCenter User Account Permissions for an Avamar account in order to setup image level backups. EMC recommends as a best practice to setup a separate account for Avamar to use during the image-level backups. This is to assist with troubleshooting any problems with backups and to also help maintain a secure vCenter environment. In high-security environments, you can restrict the vCenter user account permissions required to configure and administer the Avamar VMware image backup and restore feature to all of the following:
The following is the procedure to Shutdown Avamar GSAN:
1. Log on to the system as user admin.
2. Load the ssh keys
ssh-agent bash
ssh-add .ssh/admin_key
3. Verify hfscheck and garbage collect are not running.
ps -eaf|egrep “gc_cron|cp_cron|hfscheck_cron”
If hfscheck is still running, run “hfscheck_kill” as user admin to kill it off.
If GC is still running, you will need to let it finish before continuing.
If CP is running, you will need to let it finish running.
4. Take a checkpoint (as dpn)
su – dpn
ssh-agent bash
ssh-add .ssh/dpnid
cp_cron –duplog
exit
exit (Note..you should now be back to admin)
5. Stop the EMS and MCS
suspend_crons
dpnctl stop ems
dpnctl stop mcs
6. Stop the GSAN
shutdown.dpn
7. Verify avamar is shutdown
dpnctl status
In this output it shows avamar is down:
dpnctl: INFO: gsan status: down
dpnctl: INFO: MCS status: down.
dpnctl: INFO: EMS status: down.
dpnctl: INFO: Scheduler status: down.
dpnctl: INFO: Maintenance operations status: suspended.
dpnctl: INFO: Unattended startup status: disabled.
dpnctl: INFO: [see log file “/usr/local/avamar/var/log/dpnctl.log”]
Now you can safely power off the hardware.
I recently came across an issue where the avamar garbage collect was not running. When I run a status.dpn on the grid I get the following message for the garbage collect status:
Last GC: finished Wed Aug 25 01:01:04 2010 after 00m 50s >> recovered 0.00 KB (MSG_ERR_DISKFULL)
The total grid utilization is currently at 87% and I also saw some Unacknowledged Events with the following information:
Code: 4202 Message: failed garbage collection with error MSG_ERR_DISKFULL
This error is a direct result of the garbage collect run limit being reached or exceeded due to excessive checkpoint overhead. To verify and check all of the node capacities use the following commands; also if this is a single node you will not have to use the mapall command.
su – admin
ssh-agent bash
ssh-add ~admin/.ssh/admin_key
Enter the passphrase for the admin keys. (If you dont know what it is then you should not be doing this) Then run:
mapall –noerror ‘df -h’
This should give you the filesystem for each node including the sizes, used, and space available. Then run:
avmaint nodelist | grep percent-full
This will give you a cleaner output of the numbers that really matter. Pay attention to each node’s “abs-percent-full”
In most cases you should contact EMC support to resolve this issue, however in some cases running an HFS check or checkpoint validation on your oldest checkpoint might free up enough overhead to get you back on track.
Backup Exec 2010 R2 is the second release of Backup Exec 2010 and is generally available to all users starting today, August 2nd, 2010.
This release features improvements in usability, licensing and renewal management, deduplication, virtualization, and extends platform and application support. Here are some of the most important features that the release introduces…
•Enhanced Installation and backup wizards reduce the time and complexity of setting up your backups
•Backup recommendation tool identifies potential gaps in your backup strategy and provides recommendations on the agent(s) required to ensure complete data protection.
•Integrated RSS and Renewal Assistant help keep you informed and current.
•NEW! support for SharePoint 2010, Exchange 2010 SP1, Microsoft SQL 2008 R2, Enterprise Vault 9, Mac OSX 10.6, NDMP NetApp ONTAP 8.0, EMC DART 6.0, and OST support for Data Domain DDOS 4.8 with Boost Technology.
And time for some good news..customers who are current with maintenance or support contracts for previous versions of their licensed Backup Exec software can upgrade to the appropriate Backup Exec 2010 R2 licenses at no additional charge.
If you are having issues logging into avamar and you see the following message “com.avamar.asn.NetworkException: Unable to connect to a login server” then the issue is usually environmental. Avamar 5.x relies heavily on DNS and improperly configured DNS will cause this issue.
If you are using windows AD for DNS, then make sure that DNS records are setup in the same domain as the domain that Avamar was setup in. If they are and still having this issue, remove duplicate avamar records from subdomains. This should resolve your issue.
If the DNS server is unix/linux based case sensitivity is usually the culperate.
One of your EMC Avamar nodes are blinking orange, what do you do ? Well the nodes themselves are rebranded DELL 710’s (GEN3) and all have an LCD screen with general status. The Dell servers also have a system event log (SEL) stored in NVRAM on the motherboard. Certain hardware events will be logged here or in the alerts event log. In either case, this will cause the LCD display to change from a pretty blue to orange. The display will show some error text of the last message written to the SEL. If the display is flashing blue, someone pressed the information button on the LCD display to identify which server you are working on in the rack. Press it again to stop the flashing and it will turn orange if errors are present in the SEL.
Dell uses Open Manage to monitor the hardware. You can use some Open Manage CLI commands to view the events and also clear the event and alert logs. This will change the display from orange back to pretty blue. Viewing the logs will show you what is causing the problem. Perhaps a disk has failed, there are Single Bit Memory Errors, the raid controller battery is bad or a power supply has failed. Avamar support will only send a power supply, disk drive or the entire node to fix a problem. Sometimes, a problem is intermittent and clearing the logs would be preferable to replacing the node. Here are some of the commands.
Log on with root and type the following commands:
View the SEL log
# omreport system esmlog
View the alert log
# omreport system alert
Clear the SEL log
# omconfig system esmlog action=clear
Clear the alert log
# omconfig system alertlog action=clear
View the disk status
# omreport storage pdisk controller=0
View the server setup
# omreport system summary
EMC Avamar agents are usually not found running directly on storage arrays, until now. At EMC world Iomega gave a sneak preview into its ix12 array with a built in Avamar agent. The Avamar agent will allow for SMB remote offices to utilize Avamar’s deduplication features without requiring additional hardware.
This is my first blog post, just breaking this thing in! You will see more Backup Recovery and Archiving posts as I get rolling !