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Avamar VMware backup and container selection
Hello guys/gals,
I am running vCenter Server 5.5 Standard edition and Avamar 7.0 Sp1 (virtual edition). In vCenter server i created a folder (WS Avamar) and moved 3 VMs into it
Now when i go into Avamar > Administration > vCenter server > right click on domain select New Clients. So i drill down to my Datacenter and then select "WS Avamar" folder and then without hitting anything else i hit OK. I get the error message in the screen shot. Now if press "Select All" which highlights all the VMs inside of that folder i can go ahead and hit OK. So what am i doing wrong, my goal is for Avamar to dynamically pickup any new VMs that are placed inside of "WS Avamar" folder but from this exercise looks i have to go in and select them manually. Any ideas ?
dynamox
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February 18th, 2014 16:00
ok, issue is that as a storage administrator i have no visibility into operating systems and applications that run on top of them so without any indicators or analysis tools it's hard to determine what would benefit with CBT off. What would be "potential" sign, VM that are constantly backing up a lot of data on daily basis ? If you see that on daily basis there is 20% of disk changes and you start experimenting by disabling CBT and see if it performs better. So to do you would have to use an exception data set that has CBT disabled ?
Sorry for so many questions, as a new user to Avamar trying to see what other folks do in the field.
ionthegeek
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February 18th, 2014 17:00
If the backup is completing within a reasonable backup window, no problem (whether you would get a performance boost from disabling CBT or not is probably irrelevant as long as you're meeting RPO and RTO objectives). I wouldn't bother investigating whether turning off CBT will boost performance unless you have clients that run long -- it would be lots of work and potentially very little return.
For clients where turning off CBT makes sense, you can either put the clients into a group where the dataset has CBT disabled or override the individual client dataset on a client-by-client basis. Do whichever makes the most sense from a "least effort to administer" point of view.
I can't really speak to what people do in the field since I'm typically only involved when things are going badly
.
dynamox
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February 18th, 2014 18:00
on that note i never want to talk to you Ian
VishuAdapa
7 Posts
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February 18th, 2014 21:00
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2014-02-19 04:04:21 avtar Info <10695>: Processing 17637 changeblocks for "virtdisk-flat.vmdk" (214,748,364,800 bytes)
2014-02-19 04:04:21 avtar Warning <10696>: VERY HIGH number of changeblocks (17637) for "virtdisk-flat.vmdk"
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If a virtual machine contains over 10,000 changed blocks, it is generally faster to back up that client with changed block tracking disabled.
Thank you
Vishu
dynamox
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February 19th, 2014 03:00
Thank you Vishu, this is helpful.
mikuszed
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February 19th, 2014 05:00
Very helpful, Vishu. Thank you. Are you looking at these metrics for a particular reason? Are you seeing CBT issues, where you need to turn it off?
Thanks again.
tmarkuk
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March 24th, 2014 02:00
I've been running into this issue recently, with numerous backups taking a very long time to complete. The problem here being this is a cloud service with several thousand VMs being backed up over 4 grids. I have no visibility of what VMs are best backed up with or without CBT from one day to the next as the clients are constantly removing and adding new VMs, using them on some days and not on others.
It would be extremely useful if Avamar could be set to use some simple logic around CBT in this instance, using it when it detects a acceptable number of change blocks, disabling it when they exceed the threshold. I have no idea if this is even remotely possible but it would be incredibly useful.