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Automating restores for routine validation of library integrity

  • 27 January 2021
  • 5 replies
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I am looking for a way to automatically perform a sample of VM restores on daily\weekly basis from the most current backups from them.  Long story short, I ran into a data integrity issue on one of my libraries and had no idea.  I.E.  VM Baselines were referencing a chunk on the library that did not exist.  Therefore, any restores that referenced that baseline kept failing.  I have my backups set to full instead of synthetic full which future backups never indicated a backup failure.  Since this incident, I would like to start routinely validating that VM restores actually work.  Plus this was on a CV Ransomware webinar slide earlier this month about validation😊.  It does not look like this can be done natively within Commcell.  Or can it?  It looks like the road to go down is the use of the Commvault PowerShell module and calling upon APIs.  Does anyone perform this kind of validation today?  How do you accomplish this?

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Best answer by MFasulo 27 January 2021, 19:31

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Userlevel 7
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Hey @Dave S - we have a feature for VMware that does backup validation natively through the UI - check it out here:https://documentation.commvault.com/commvault/v11_sp20/article?p=111292.htm

 

Beyond VMware specific, Data verification run from the DDB store, which does an optimized check and can run incrementally. The challenge with it though is that if an integrity issue occurs after the data verification has run, that can make it difficult to spot unless you run a full validation every so often (which does impact storage I/O). The challenge with traditional data verification on the job level is that you could be verifying the same data over and over, hence is the nature of deduplication. So make sure to use the option in this link as its way more efficient.

Userlevel 6
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You can do this today, using application validation (on the configuration tab of the VM group)

 

 

You can even specify scripts if you want further validation within the VM for SQL or oracle

 

https://documentation.commvault.com/11.21/essential/111292_application_validation_for_vmware_vms.html

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Thank you both for this information.  I will be sure to check it out to see if this can solve my use case. 

My intent on this post was to specifically find out a way to schedule reoccurring restores of VMs on a routine basis from the most current backups of those VMs.  The end goals is to have a report of these restores as proof to show to the business and audit.  I am quite familiar with al the dedupe options etc. based on my prior incident which in this post is out of scope.  I just want to focus on the actual restore function of a VM.  Thanks.

Userlevel 7
Badge +23

Thank you both for this information.  I will be sure to check it out to see if this can solve my use case. 

My intent on this post was to specifically find out a way to schedule reoccurring restores of VMs on a routine basis from the most current backups of those VMs.  The end goals is to have a report of these restores as proof to show to the business and audit.  I am quite familiar with al the dedupe options etc. based on my prior incident which in this post is out of scope.  I just want to focus on the actual restore function of a VM.  Thanks.

 

You could also configure live sync which creates a replica of the virtual machine from your backup data and automatically can perform validation (boot up the machine) after the sync is complete. In the live sync schedule if you configure unconditional overwrite it should perform a full restore each time.

edit: I believe live sync also provides validation status in a report

Another alternative is to start a restore and then use save as script. Use the XML generated to plug into a qoperation execute code block in a workflow and modify the parameters as you want. You can then schedule the workflow to run to any schedule.

Userlevel 6
Badge +12

Thank you both for this information.  I will be sure to check it out to see if this can solve my use case. 

My intent on this post was to specifically find out a way to schedule reoccurring restores of VMs on a routine basis from the most current backups of those VMs.  The end goals is to have a report of these restores as proof to show to the business and audit.  I am quite familiar with al the dedupe options etc. based on my prior incident which in this post is out of scope.  I just want to focus on the actual restore function of a VM.  Thanks.

Very good.  App validation will provide the ability to run on a given schedule as often or infrequent as you want and provide you with an alert/report for audit purposes!

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