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Topics started by Onno van den Berg

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Onno van den BergCommvault Certified Expert

asked in Self-Hosted Q&A

Information extraction from log files for SIEM/SOC

Hi,I'm looking for documentation around the ability to index logging related security events for SIEM/SOC purposes. Commvault software by default generates tons of log files and for me (and I suppose a lot of other customers) it is hard to get specific information from the Commvault logs for different purposes then troubleshooting. Besides that I'm looking for guidance on this, just to make sure the information can be collected in a consistent way so you are safeguarded that a future update will not break this. I'm especially looking for information how to get all information from the logs that gives me insights in things like:Activity via REST API, Command Center, CommCell console, Apps, etc. Activity towards (and through) network gateways. Activity to/from functionality with external components like external REST API's, Key Vaults. Communication between client computers. Data retrieval e.g. who is retrieving data from the platform via a restore, download functionality in Comman

Onno van den BergCommvault Certified Expert

asked in Virtualization and Containers

VMware Cloud Director v10.4 Support

Last month VMware released VCD 10.4 which is an exciting release for a lot of VMware Cloud Providers. But this time they also deprecated a lot of older API versions including the API version that is being used by Commvault. We currently run FR26 which uses API version 31 to communicate with VCD so we cannot upgrade to VCD 10.4 and it's also not listed as part of the supported version in the FR28/2022e documentation.I heard rumours support will be added in a FR28 (2022e) maintenance release somewhere in the near future, but I hope someone can be more clear on when we can expect VCD 10.4 to be supported. From the release notes:VMware Cloud Director API versions 31.0 and 32.0 are not supported VMware Cloud Director API versions 33.0, 34.0, 35.0 and 35.2 are deprecated and will be unsupported starting with the next major VMware Cloud Director release.https://docs.vmware.com/en/VMware-Cloud-Director/10.4/rn/vmware-cloud-director-104-release-notes/index.html

Onno van den BergCommvault Certified Expert

asked in Virtualization and Containers

VMware UUID / duplicate client computers

We just started the implementation of Commvault in a brand new VMware environment. Now I'm seeing already an increased amount of duplicate client computers in our environment causing some administrative nightmares and management challenges.So I started investigating it and discovered the UUID registration to differ from what I'm used to when comparing it to AWS. It appears the registered UUID in Commvault is actually the so called PersistentID/InstanceUUID and this one can't be tracked back from within the VM itself. The UUID that is shown from the OS corresponds to the VMware BIOS UUID. We installed some client agents first followed by the configuration of the VSA agent. Both are being used actively. Fixing duplicate client names is an annoying tasks, especially in MSP environments and I'm puzzled this hasn't been fixed by Commvault. Because when you would use the combination of Commvault client name + BIOS UUID and the name that can be read by the client including UUID than matching

Onno van den BergCommvault Certified Expert

asked in Self-Hosted Q&A

Applying UNIX permissions via Command Center

For existing clients on where you push out application/database agents afterwards you most of the time have to run the cvpkgchg command to replace the permissions. In case of a push installation via the CommCell console you have a possibility to enable to option "Override Unix Group And Permissions”.https://documentation.commvault.com/11.24/expert/1935_changing_unix_groups_and_permissions_on_unix_clients.htmlThis checkbox is not present in Command Center (https://documentation.commvault.com/11.24/essential/127715_adding_database_server_for_sybase.html). Does this mean that it will do it automatically? My assumption is that it only works for new push installation not for scenarios in where client the client computer is already equipped with a restore-only client.

Onno van den BergCommvault Certified Expert

asked in Self-Hosted Q&A

Storage accelerator - who is using it and what are you experiences

My team is responsible for delivering Commvault as a Platform and we manage multiple environments. All environment leverage cloud storage as their primary storage target and we are deploying storage accelerator now to maximize the usage towards our on-premise S3 target which is FlashBlade/S target.Now the challenge we run into is the lack of visibility if storage accelerator is actually being used by the client or by the access node. According to the documentation you should be able to see on on the job details of a running backup if storage accelerator is used when the MediaAgent is showing the client name. However this didn't happen and we new for a fact that the client was able to connect. We opened a ticket more than 12 months ago and investigation lead to the resolution that the product contains a "cosmetic” bug resulting in the job controller detail not showing the change. Only way to investigate if the client is working and using storage accelerator is by going into the logs. A

Onno van den BergCommvault Certified Expert

posted in Self-Hosted Q&A

Commvault GO event 2022

I'm curious to hear if there are plans to organize a Commvault GO event this year. Also keen to see how many from the community would attend if this get's organized. Would be nice to meet some of you in person.

Onno van den BergCommvault Certified Expert

asked in Virtualization and Containers

FREL/access node auto-deploy from Command Center

I have been playing around with a feature that allows you to deploy VMware-based FREL and/or access nodes directory from Command Center. This feature works out nicely, it requires some aftercare for hwich I opened a CMR but it also raised some questions.I'm running FR26 with the the latest maintenance release applied, but the version of the FREL/access node that is deployed is FR25. The cloud portal shows a FR26 version, so why is it downloading and deploying an outdated version? Why is it not automatically being updated to the same FR/MR that runs on the CommServe? In addition to Commvault updates what about OS updates? How often is the OVA which is based on Oracle Linux being updated by Commvault? Will Command Center notify me a of a new build, and will it download and auto-replace the existing nodes with the newer version automatically reusing the configuration settings that were entered during the initial setup?Update → official documentation link: https://documentation.commvault.c

Onno van den BergCommvault Certified Expert

posted in Share Best Practices

VMware Cloud Director plug-in experiences

Hi,We are in the proces of designing an environment based on VMware VCF with VMware Cloud Director. Customers will consume VMware services and others via Cloud Director hence we are thinking to use the Cloud Director from Commvault as well. Unfortunately I do not have a lab available right now to test it out but was looking for some screenshots/videos to get a better impression on the UX and its capabilities.Competition delivers Cloud Director nowadays based on the extension framework that was introduced some time ago, but I cannot get from the documentation if Commvault is using the same framework. VMware itself states they have an extension that is build by them, not by Commvault is that correct?C o h e s i ty R u b r i k Also curious to hear experience from other Cloud Director customers. We b.t.w. do have experience with the vCenter plugin which is also very disappointing.

Onno van den BergCommvault Certified Expert

asked in Self-Hosted Q&A

Activate FSO experiences and why am I missing the option to archive

I'm investigating if we could blend in Activate FSO to fulfill an archiving use-case, but according to the documentation it seems Activate FSO does not allow you to pick the results and perform an archive action. The documentation only refers to (https://documentation.commvault.com/11.22/expert/118724_moving_files_in_file_storage_optimization.html) the ability to move, delete or tag the data. Is this correct? And if that is the case then what's the reason that we do not have the ability to perform a file archive?

Onno van den BergCommvault Certified Expert

asked in Storage and Deduplication

Size on disk value related to cloud libraries is incorrect

While trying to figure out how to gather BET for charging purposes I noticed that the size on disk as displayed both in Command Center and CommCell console for cloud libraries to be incorrect. I have opened a ticket for it and in particular referred to S3 buckets, but I was wondering it other customers see the same and if it also occurs on libraries using Microsoft Azure Storage or other types/vendors. Please comment in case you see identify the same. I noticed it while running FR26 and FR28 (2022e).

Onno van den BergCommvault Certified Expert

asked in Self-Hosted Q&A

Job update time lacking behind

Something that is annoying me for some time now is that we often see running jobs with a job update time that is lacking behind for 15 min. and more. This has an effect on the information like average speed and also gives a "incorrect” indication to the end-user performing a backup/recovery. Especially during a restore this is seen so a user has no idea how long the recovery will take.I did some investigation already but without results. Anyone an idea if there is something to tweak?

Onno van den BergCommvault Certified Expert

asked in Self-Hosted Q&A

Command Center - Hidden client computers -> CTRL-F5 to the rescue

Ever since Command Center was equipped with client side caching enhancements we occasionally get customers on the phone who ask us if there is something wrong with the backup environment, because they are missing client computers in Command Center. Even while running the latest maintenance release for FR11.21. When we logon to Command Center as platform admins we do see the client computer(s) in question, so we just ask the customer to perform a CTRL-F5 hard refresh of the client-side cache. Checking the server side log (CVEntityCache) reveals no errors whatsoever.Now I hope to hear from other Vaulters if they have experienced this same issue and at what frequency. Reason for asking is that it "hard/impossible” to reproduce and if the customers knows the CTRL-F5 trick than next time they will most likely not call you anymore because they know the trick, but this of course does not fix the real issue.

Onno van den BergCommvault Certified Expert

asked in Self-Hosted Q&A

CommServe database views

I'm trying to assemble a list, for customer billing based on companies, of unique client object who are protected by all forms of protection methods. So think of application-level, file-system-level and VM-level and all within the scope of a company. So I though this would be an easy walk in the park by enumerating views:Lic_CUR_ProtectedVMs_vw - to retrieve a list of VMs who are protected on VM-level Lic_CUR_VOIs_vw - to retrieve a list of VM's who are protected using an agent.I would then make sure to filter out the duplicatie objects (I will have to do some filtering machine as I'm already noticing duplicate client computer with an _ in their names) and to remove the clients from the output of Lic_CUR_VOIs_vw who exist in the output of Lic_CUR_ProtectedVMs_vw because I want to make sure we capture all VMs running on an on-premise cloud platform which doesn't support VM-level protection.Now I'm running into an issue in where the output of Lic_CUR_VOIs_vw is not showing clients who I

Onno van den BergCommvault Certified Expert

asked in Storage and Deduplication

Cloud library - Cache configurations

Noticed FR26 delivered a cloud library configuration setting seen from within Command Center named "Cache configurations".Can someone enlighten me what it is and what it does? I can't find any information on the documentation site.

Onno van den BergCommvault Certified Expert

asked in Virtualization and Containers

VMware Cloud Director - Commvault picks wrong access nodes when using hot-add in a multi-cluster environment

I'm trying to wrap my head around the following. I'm setting up VM-level protection in a VMware environment and I'm using the VCD hypervisor because we want to deliver VM-level protection to our cloud customers. So I configured a vCenter hypervisor first and added the VCD hypervisor afterwards, which leverages the vCenter hypervisor. Right now there are 4 active clusters with a few others coming soon. I deployed access nodes on all clusters and they are all listed as access node. Our backup method should be hot-add, because we'll have to close down/limit connectivity between clusters because of security, so NBD will not be an option anymore. The "first" access node in the list acting as the communicator is able to communicate to all other access nodes via a network topology, no errors what so ever to be seen when it comes to the communication between the nodes.Now when setting the transport mode to hot-add all jobs so far failed with the error that the access node cannot mount the disk

Onno van den BergCommvault Certified Expert

asked in Self-Hosted Q&A

Restore validation/data refresh through Command Center

We have an active program to discourage the use of the CommCell console. Reason is that it is not supported in combination with SAML and reseller mode and additionally we want to move everyone over to Command Center. This is a big change and people are pretty bad accepting change so it is not always easy and they use a lot of features…… I will not move towards a discussion around feature adoption in Command Center because I do not want a like-4-like move from the CommCell console to the Command Center but I do miss something related to the ability to perform data refreshes and/or scheduled restores to validate the ability to recover data.Customers need to proof that they are able to recover data for auditing purposes. Additionally they also use backup/restore to perform data refreshes for testing purposes and I currently have no idea how to accomplish this without the CommCell console. Only way I would know is to script it through the API but to me these use-cases are fundamentally rel

Onno van den BergCommvault Certified Expert

asked in Software Upgrades and Updates

Availability communicated maintenance releases

Last week we received a mail notifying us that new maintenance relapses were available. We run both FR32 and FR34. • 11.34.11 (06-Feb-2024)• 11.32.42 (06-Feb-2024)For both platform releases we now notice that those maintenance releases are not available anymore, instead MA shows 11.32.43 and 11.34.13.What happend to the maintenance releases who were made available last week? Were they pulled back or were they replaced, without communication, because new critical fixes were released? What should you do when you are running on 11.34.11 or 11.32.42?

Onno van den BergCommvault Certified Expert

asked in Self-Hosted Q&A

Tweak FS performance of File server via Command Center

We're running FR30.43 and a customer asked us if there are ways to improve backup/recovery performance of a Windows File Server cluster based on Windows Storage Spaces Direct. Our customers manage everything via Command Center and have to access to the CommCell console. From the CommCell console there are/were several ways that allowed you to improve backup/restore performance:Enable the option "Allow multiple data readers within a drive or mount point" Increase data readers Spread contents over multiple subclientsBesides the last one mentioned the other two mentioned cannot be set/tweaked when you use protection plans. So, my questions is what is the default behaviour when using plans and what options can you implement that improve backup/recovery performance for large file servers.

Onno van den BergCommvault Certified Expert

asked in Developer Tools, Integration and Automation

REST API leaking too much information related to authentication

I was busy writing some code last week and while I was coding the authentication part I noticed the following. When you perform an authentication attempt against the API you will get output information back which contains information that can be used to perform a brute-force attack.Return information after an invalid authentication attempt:Now in case you use a valid username than you will see the Loginattempts incrementing:This means you found a valid account, so let's push forward until it the account is locked!So the API is also giving back the time you have to wait until you can try it again. Exposing this kind of information makes it easier for people with bad intentions to perform brute-force attacks. Sure companies nowadays should embrace/use MFA, but when you want to automate certain actions, for example through a CI/CD pipeline, than the MFA becomes a blocker so you'll have to diverge back. I think it's time to come-up with something better that can be used for automation task

Onno van den BergCommvault Certified Expert

asked in Self-Hosted Q&A

Determining RTO

In practice we see many of our customers determining RTO’s based on paper exercises before even validating what it takes to live up to the RTO SLA agreement. In case organization refer to RTO-0 than they refer to high availability which can be achieved using for example clustering technologies combined with sync. mirror storage or application with built-in capabilities relying in a distributed backend. However it doesn’t protect in case you run into cyber security threats, malicious intent or human failure.Now you have to rely on your backup copy to recovery to a specific point in time. Now let’s forget the time that it takes before the actual recovery process starts which is easily forgotten, but what actually adds-up to the entire recovery time. Let’s not take into account the MTD which stand for the maximum tolerated downtime as well but let’s focus on the RTO definition within Commvault. What is the rule of thumb that Commvault uses itself to determine the RTO? I remember to recall

Onno van den BergCommvault Certified Expert

asked in Self-Hosted Q&A

Can you still run the new documentation that was introduced in FR21 offline?

Can you still run the new documentation that was introduced in FR21 offline?

Onno van den BergCommvault Certified Expert

asked in Developer Tools, Integration and Automation

Rest API: Explanation vmStatusInfo-> Vendor property / identify underlying HV type

I'm trying to automate certain tasks by querying the APIs. I first tried the newly released Powershell SDK which turned out to be broken right now. The development team is aware and they stated they will fix it somewhere next week so I decided to continue without SDK and write the modules myself.I'm trying to achieve the following:In case the client is discovered via VSA I would like to know the hypervisor vendor. In case a client is not part of VSA I would like to know if it runs as a virtual instance and preferably I would like to know what kind of virtualization platform. I know Commvault pulls this information from a client using the agent to make the distinction between OI and VOI and also that they can identify the platform but would like to leverage this myself as well and I would expect this information to be available as a client property that can by pulled over via the API. 1)So I already discovered that in case a client is discovered through the VSA client that the client pr

Onno van den BergCommvault Certified Expert

posted in Share Best Practices

Upgrading existing FREL appliances to FR32 might fail in case FREL appliance cannot access public Internet

This is just an informative message for customers using FREL appliances. In case you upgrade an existing FREL appliances that is based on FR30 or earlier and in case the FREL is unable to connect to the public Internet than the upgrade to FR32 will cause the FREL to go offline. During the upgrade to FR32 it tries to pull some packages from a public repo which is not possible. I have an outstanding ticket for it and the only solution now is to refresh the appliances with the FR32 FREL.I in all honesty also hope development reconsiders the current approach and implement an automatic FREL refresh function that can automatically re-deploy FREL appliances preserving the current configuration using a one-button refresh option. This is a much better approach than offering a solution that can push out FREL OS updates.

Onno van den BergCommvault Certified Expert

posted in Self-Hosted Q&A

Issue with Missed SLA alert

I have the same "issue” with the missed SLA alert that was introduced very recently https://documentation.commvault.com/11.25/expert/133789_newsletter_for_new_features_in_feature_release_1123.html#email-alerts-for-client-computers-that-might-miss-or-might-have-missed-sla

Onno van den BergCommvault Certified Expert

asked in Getting Started

SQL upgrade required in FR25??

We just installed a brand new CommServe for testing and noticed it came along with SQL 2019. Now the documentation states the following:Note: Beginning in Feature Release 11.25, during the installation of the CommServe software or other server packages, Commvault installs Microsoft SQL Server 2019 Standard Edition by default. See: https://documentation.commvault.com/11.24/expert/142606_upgrading_microsoft_sql_server_2016_standard_edition_to_microsoft_sql_server_2019_standard_edition.htmlNow as SQL 2019 is already installed by default as part of FR25 it to me raised the question if the note in the documentation actually indicates that it requires SQL 2019 to be installed. SQL 2012 R2 extended support is ending next year, so to me it would make sense to start informing customers that they should make plans to upgrade. Most likely you are also still running on Windows 2012 R2 so it would require a full refresh of both OS and SQL.Anyway I'm curious to hear if FR25 will require SQL 2019 to

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