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v11.28 metallic capacity bug

  • 17 December 2022
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We have metallic cloud capacity licence for 170Tb. Our backups stopped working  Following update to 11.28. It turns out following the update our usage was recalculated and we are now told we have used 300Tbs - 176% over our licence. Support say the update fixed a bug in the way the space was calculated.  How can this be the case. We are left in a position that our backups currently aren't running.  We need to purchase substantislly more capacity which we haven't budgeted for. The process for acquiring the new licence seems to take days which leaves us with no way to back up our data currently 

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Best answer by Damian Andre 19 December 2022, 03:16

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Hi @joberg,

I apologize that you have been caught up with this issue and that it is affecting your environment. I’ll try explain as best i can about the (two) issues that have occurred with metering of MRR/MCSS over the last month or so. Support is correct about some discrepancies in usage calculation but its not that simple of an issue.

Capacity calculation for MCSS/MRR libraries was lagging behind and was fixed later in November (without the need to install an update). As usage was under-reporting, it allowed some customers to inadvertently extend past their purchased capacity since the software thought it had used less than what it had.

Traditionally, CommCells reach out using an API request in the cloud that responds with the actual usage of your MCSS/MRR library. However it was discovered that this method had been under-reporting in certain conditions and was corrected around November 17th by fixing the system that calculates usage in the cloud.

All customers that had under-reporting usage should have now caught up with a change/fix made to the API. (Lets call this, issue #1).

At the same time a patch was created that switches the method that CommCells use to calculate capacity for MCSS/MRR libraries. Now the system will itself walk the MCSS library using traditional space checks rather than reaching out to that cloud API - a much more scalable way of doing the calculation.

However (and here’s the catch). If you installed Commvault prior to V11 Service pack 14 then space check had always been disabled for cloud libraries. This means that its never run a space check against your Metallic library and it will sum up the size of every bit of data that was ever written - likely putting you over usage.  Once you install the patch it immediately turns on cloud library space checks (usage calculation). Lets call this, issue #2.

Of course, your library could over-usage anyway due to the under-reporting API issue (Issue #1) - but now it could take some time for the actual usage to be calculated as the checks walk through your entire MCSS library. If the cause of your over-usage happened immediately after installing updates then you are likely affected by Issue #2 - it can take a few days to catch up on the calculations, however support have settings to loosen the throttle and allow the space check calculations to happen much faster bringing you back to actual usage.

If you are in a bind your account/sales rep can get a temporary license to tide you over while you assess the best way to move forward - you may not be over-usage and it may be issue #2 - if you monitor your usage reports since installing the update and notice your usage is going down, without removing any data, then you might just need to ramp up the speed calculation.

According to the health metrics reports for your CommCell, I see that you *should* be under usage (161TB) - so it may have caught up over the weekend, but please check and confirm on your side.

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