Avamar and Windows mount points

I'm not aware of any special procedure for backing up mount points. General advice for backing up clusters -- be sure to back up local resources using the agent on the physical node and cluster resources using the cluster agent.

no takers ?

Ian,

does it backup one mount point at a time ?

As far as I know. I haven't tested it but I don't believe the client treats mount points differently from any other volume.

I have added SAN drives to the exclude list on each physical node yet the client is still trying to back them up ?

2014-06-19 18:07:40 avtar Info <7838>: - Adding user exclude "*:\$Recycle.Bin"

2014-06-19 18:07:40 avtar Info <7838>: - Adding user exclude "E:\**"

2014-06-19 18:07:40 avtar Info <7838>: - Adding user exclude "F:\**"

2014-06-19 18:07:40 avtar Info <7838>: - Adding user exclude "W:\**"

2014-06-19 18:07:44 avtar Info <7324>: Volume Type for "C:\" is "NTFS", Supports Compression=1, Encryption=1, ACLS=1, DataStreams=1, Reparse=1, Sparse=1, Hardlinks=1

2014-06-19 18:07:44 avtar Info <7324>: Volume Type for "D:\" is "NTFS", Supports Compression=1, Encryption=1, ACLS=1, DataStreams=1, Reparse=1, Sparse=1, Hardlinks=1

2014-06-19 18:07:44 avtar Info <7324>: Volume Type for "E:\" is "NTFS", Supports Compression=1, Encryption=1, ACLS=1, DataStreams=1, Reparse=1, Sparse=1, Hardlinks=1

2014-06-19 18:07:44 avtar Info <7324>: Volume Type for "F:\" is "NTFS", Supports Compression=1, Encryption=1, ACLS=1, DataStreams=1, Reparse=1, Sparse=1, Hardlinks=1

2014-06-19 18:07:44 avtar Info <7324>: Volume Type for "W:\" is "NTFS", Supports Compression=1, Encryption=1, ACLS=1, DataStreams=1, Reparse=1, Sparse=1, Hardlinks=1

2014-06-19 18:07:44 avtar Info <10665>: Backup will snapshot mounted path f:\mp5

2014-06-19 18:07:44 avtar Info <10665>: Backup will snapshot mounted path f:\mp4

2014-06-19 18:07:44 avtar Info <10665>: Backup will snapshot mounted path f:\mp3

2014-06-19 18:07:44 avtar Info <10665>: Backup will snapshot mounted path f:\mp8

2014-06-19 18:07:44 avtar Info <10665>: Backup will snapshot mounted path f:\mp7

2014-06-19 18:07:44 avtar Info <10665>: Backup will snapshot mounted path f:\mp6

2014-06-19 18:07:44 avtar Info <10665>: Backup will snapshot mounted path f:\mp2

2014-06-19 18:07:44 avtar Info <10665>: Backup will snapshot mounted path f:\mp1

2014-06-19 18:07:44 avtar Info <7409>: Freeze volume list : C:\ D:\ E:\ F:\ W:\ f:\mp5 f:\mp4 f:\mp3 f:\mp8 f:\mp7 f:\mp6 f:\mp2 f:\mp1

2014-06-19 18:07:44 avtar Info <10967>: Found System Provider GUID. Will be using the System Provider GUID to perform backup

2014-06-19 18:07:44 avtar Info <8776>: Creating snapshot set...

2014-06-19 18:07:44 avtar Info <8780>: Creating the shadow (DoSnapshotSet) ...

2014-06-19 18:14:31 avtar Info <8781>: Shadow copy set successfully created.

2014-06-19 18:14:31 avtar Info <8785>: Retrieving volume mappings...

2014-06-19 18:14:31 avtar Info <8803>:

Any idea why my exclude list is being ignored ?

Ian,

yes, i did notice that even though it appeared as all volumes got "snapshotted" it actually did skip E:\, F:\ and W:\

Here is my current configuration:

Two node Win2k8 R2 cluster, each node has a C:\ and a D:\ local drive.  For the individual physical nodes i created avtar.cmd file and added E:\, F:\ and W:\ to the exclude list. For the "cluster" instance i created a brand new dataset and added C:\ and D:\ to the dataset exclude list. I then used this dataset for the cluster instance (modified client settings and set to "override group dataset).  I only have one cluster in the environment so i did not want to create yet another policy group.

So now exclusion is handled using avamar server dataset for the "cluster" instance, and local avtar.cmd for the physical hosts. Can i add "freeze exclude devices" to avtar.cmd and what is the difference between freezing volumes versus freezing devices.

Thank you very much, looking forward to your feedback.

Just about anything you can add to a dataset can be added to avtar.cmd. I don't foresee any problems with adding freeze excludes to avtar.cmd. The flags will look like:

--freezeexcludevolume=E:\,F:\ --freezeexcludedevice=\Device\HardDisk1

Excluding by volume is probably easier because you can usually identify the volumes by drive letter. When you're excluding by device, you need to know the Windows device path. If there are multiple volumes on one device, excluding the device will exclude all the volumes. This is a "six of one, half dozen of the other" configuration. Use whichever approach you find easier in your environment.

My pleasure!

Is this still the only way to handle multiple concurrent backups (7.0 SP1) ?. With 5 x 10TB mount points running one mount point at a time will take ages to complete.

Change Number of Streams Running Per Client

Thank you

Multiple avtars is our "nuclear" option. Other available options depend on the environment. I'd recommend working with support.

I'm not comfortable documenting the other options here because people regularly ignore my advice that parallelism should only be enabled when it's a good fit for the client. MOAR PARALLELISM IS MOAR BETTER!

i have a support ticket opened, the tech mentioned there are more options in 7.x as opposed to earlier version. He has not given me the specifics yet.

Hello, i know its real old post, but problem is still valid.

I managed to run multiple sessions per client at single node SQL host as in manual, but clustered hosts fails to run, even if im setting everything as in documentation.  BTW. Avamar 7.1. Anyone had a success with such a case?

If you're having performance or scaling problems, I would strongly recommend you work with support. They can help you identify the bottleneck and determine an appropriate solution.