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Is there a way to use specific MA IP address during LiveMount?

  • 17 August 2021
  • 7 replies
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In customer environment there is a network separation in place. There are 3 VLANs
1) VLAN1 - vcenter / esxi host management
2) VLAN2 - MediaAgent / backup network
3) VLAN3 - NFS storage network

ESXi hosts are configured in VLAN1 (management network) and VLAN3 (NFS storage network)
MediaAgent is configured in VLAN2 and VLAN3 (NFS transport mode)

This works great for backups and restores, but since VLAN3 is not routed a LiveMount feature does not work - an ESXi host can't mount NFS from MediaAgent. AFAIK that is because since VLAN3 is the storage network, ESXi host will try to mount NFS using that network. Unfortunately it cannot reach main MediaAgent NIC in VLAN2 (that is a network interface that MA hostname is resolved to). Switching to MA NIC in VLAN3 is also not the answer since it is not routed and can't reach ESXi host management in VLAN1. Since it is a Commvault ↔ VMware traffic DIPs also cannot be used.


A solution could be if there is a way to tell Commvault software which MA IP address should be used to mount NFS. There are some Additional settings for different ports usage (nMount3Port, nNfs3Port) but I can't find anything that would allow me to specify an IP address that should be used for NFS mounts during LiveMount.

Can anyone suggest how to cope with such setup or if maybe there is undocumented Additional Settings like “nMount3Address” that would solve my issue nice and easy? :blush:

 

Cheers.

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Best answer by Robert Horowski 18 August 2021, 09:46

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Hey Robert, Let me check this internally and get back to you.

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Hi @Alireza B 

Thanks! Let me know about your findings.

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Hi Robert,

In this situation does the MA have an IP address that the ESX host should be using to connect back to the NFS service on the MA?  Or in other words is the MA multi-homed in both VLAN2 which can talk to VLAN1; and have an address in VLAN3 that the ESX host should be using to talk back to the MA over NFS?

One of the things that we do when mounting the NFS datastore is retry this operation for the MA’s FQDN, if that fails we enumerate all of the IP addresses that are bound on the MA and try to mount using each address until we get a successful mount.  So assuming that the MA does have an address that the ESX host could use; this should already work, and if that is failing please we need a case logged for support to investigate based on what we have in logs etc.
 

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Hi @Alireza B 

That is great news! Since I do have a working NIC on VLAN3 on MediaAgent this should already work based on the information provided. I will ask the customer to double check the firewall on MA side or even bring it down and retry the test and if that won’t help then I will log the case.

Thanks!

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Great news @Alireza B !  You are amazing, as always!

@Robert Horowski , if you do end up creating a support case, share the incident number here so I can track it for resolution.

Thanks!

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Hi All,

 

A little late but I wanted to let you all know that it works exactly like @Alireza B described and after opening some ports on firewall it’s working as expected.

 

Once again thanks!

Userlevel 7
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Awesome, and never too late to confirm a solution as far as I’m concerned :sunglasses:

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