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MSP | Automatically assigning Subclient/VM Groups to a Company (Tenant)

  • 19 January 2022
  • 7 replies
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J
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Hi,

We have a MSP customer that is backing up Virtual Machines for several customers using VMWare vCloud Director.

Currently they are using the automatically created “Smart Client Group”, which is created whenever a new company is created to automatically assign Virtual Machines to these companies. In this Smart Client Group, they add a rule to include all Virtual Machines in a specific subclient that was created for this company under the vCloud Director client.

This works “ok”, but it’s making this rather complex and they would like to know if it’s possible to assign a subclient/VM group to a company directly, so all new Virtual Machines that are discovered in this subclient/VM group are automatically assigned to that company. (Without the use of these Smart Client Groups)

I have gone through the documentation website, but haven’t found anything specific. Does anybody else have experience with this?

Jeremy

 

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7 replies

Mike Struening RETIRED
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@Jeremy , thanks for the post.  I also looked around and am not seeing the option you are looking for.  Smart Client Groups are the main method to utilize.

Are they looking to basically assign any client entity (backupset, subclient, etc.) to a Company, and have the ownership propagate down repeatedly?

That might be a bit difficult to manage without a central ‘ruler’ as you’d have to keep checking each entity to see where the ownership is set, and where it gets inherited, etc. though I may not understand the request accurately.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/michael-struening
Onno van den Berg
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@Jeremy can't they just create the hypervisor config within the tenant itself? that way it is created in the context of the MSP customer itself which also makes it less accessible for errors in the smart client computer group. I of course assume here that they are creating the configuration as master. 

J
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Hi,

They have one vCloud Director pseudoclient configured in Commvault to back up all VMs in this vCloud Director environment. This vCloud Director manages multiple tenants with each their own VMs. When a new company/tenant is added to this vCloud Director environment, the MSP also creates a new company in Commvault to back up their VMs. In Commvault, they will create a new subclient under the pseudoclient for this company which contains all VMs of this company.

So currently, they are using the “Smart” Client Computer Group in Commvault that gets created when a new Company is created, and add the automatic association rule “Client discovered using VSA Subclient”, so when the customer adds news VMs to the vCloud Director environment, Commvault picks those up automatically without any manual intervention.

They are now asking if there is a way to make this work without using the Smart Client Computer Groups. So maybe assign that specific subclient to a specific company. I doubt this exists, as a subclient is just an entity within Commvault that contains VMs. Maybe a workflow that goes through the subclient and when it detects new VMs, assign them to the company. But I’m not sure.

So I wanted to check with the community if something like this exists at all. If not, I’ll have to advise the customer create a CMR.

FYI, I’m not a vCloud Director specialist, so I don’t know all the details.

Jeremy

Onno van den Berg
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Well the challenge here is that they are using one hypervisor configuration on CommCell level that talks to Cloud Director (most likely using admin privileges e.g this configurations covers all VMs in all tenants. And they se the smart client group function to pull the right VMs towards the different tenants. What they should do is create the hypervisor in the company so each and every company will have their own hypervisor configuration in place. This makes sure tenancy is secured and it does not allow the creation of addition smart client computer groups because the hypervisor is created in the context of the Commvault tenant and the Cloud Director Tenant.

J
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Hi Onno,

I see what you mean, that might be the ideal solution. I’ll discuss this with our customer.

I found the corresponding documentation article about this: https://documentation.commvault.com/11.24/essential/125815_self_service_backup_and_restore_for_vcloud_director_tenants.html

Thanks.

Onno van den Berg
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Great! It is also very easy to automate through SDKs/APIs.

 

 

Mike Struening RETIRED
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@Onno van den Berg is a legend!!

https://www.linkedin.com/in/michael-struening
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