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Newbie Alert!

 

Hello Everyone

 

I am new to Commvault I took over an environment which has more than 200 storage policies. These policies were created as a result of plans created using command center. We have more than 2000 VMs and 200+ filesystem clients and Databases. I was wondering how should I approach the cleanup. Is it a good idea to use plans for larger environments, because as a result of single plan there are multiple configurations created automatically. 

 

Thank You

Hi There.

 

My understanding is that:

  • Using base plan will avoid having multiple SP. A plan derived from a base plan used the same SP
  • Commvault uses some kind of AI to make sure backups are taken within the backup window and should not run all jobs simultaneously.
  • We can still overwrite start time/number of readers at Subclient/VM group level if needed.

Is that true ?

Thanks

 

Great questions.   

#1  It depends. Remember what a plan encapsulates, so depending on what gets manipulated on the derived plan will determine what you get as an end result.   If you just derive a plan and change nothing: no net new objects are created, everything just points to the original configuration, all you have is a derived plan with a new name.  

If you override the storage components, you will get a net new SP.  

If you override the RPO, you will get a new set of schedule policies in the backend.  

If you override “folder to backup” you will get new subclient policies.

 

#2  Truth!  We leverage a combination of strike count, priority,  and time series based ML to determine completion times, to determine who goes first.  

#3 Also true, and thats why bigger buckets of objects help manage an environment.  But just like #2, we have a dynamic tiering approach for VM backup distribution, access node assignment, and stream allocation.   Dynamic VM backup distribution helps to avoid hotspots, especially on storage.  Thats why even with a big bucket VM group, we will continually (not just at the beginning of the job) load balance and dispatch across the infrastructure.  There is also a multi-faceted assessment of choosing access nodes assignment that uses proximity to host, storage, vm networks, and even subnet to find optimal paths.  We also dynamically assign/reassign streams to the VM backup, so regardless if a VM is single disk or multi, freed up streams can be reallocated to speed up the protection operations.  

And for the folks who want the ultimate control over what is happening, you could always hardcode access nodes, create segmented VM groups, and control readers and streams as necessary. 

 

 

 

Thinks @MFasulo great work once again. Sometimes when you are in front of a grumpy customer who is watching and questioning your every click - it's easy to miss. Cheers

@Anthony.Hodges  Thank you. That clears my doubt. Currently we have it this way, multiple plans for multiple groups triggering at different times. The reason behind this was that triggering so many VMs at the same time can cause server overload and can possibly break things. But with Plans and VM Groups that should not be the case. We can I believe control the number of streams that will run at a given time and group together as much VMs we can.

@Abdul Wajid Classic Commvault Hypervisor subclients also let you specify the number of readers, so Command Center VM Groups that are configured with Plans are a just continuation of that logic.  The rule of thumb I typically go for is for every VM in a Group I go for about 10 readers, so tune as necessary.  So if your overnight backups start at 9PM, you may have some incrementals that start a few hours later and for most situations that is perfectly fine.

In addition to the extensive and detailed explication from @MFasulo regarding plan, I would definitely recommend to adhere to plans instead of going back to the old school. Plans are the future!

 

You also see this back in the functionality that has been added to the solution over the last few months as they do not support regular old school storage policies anymore e.g. when configuring it through Command Center.

 

Onno I could hug you for this (when the world opens back up, come to NJ, all the scotch you can drink is on me).     Plans will continue to evolve and there will be features that you will only take advantage of when leveraging plans.  As we continue to look into incorporating ML based logic into plans for things like RPO adherence and prioritization, plans becomes an essential part of the future of Command Center.

 

 

Deal 😉 I'm a big fan of the idea behind it, because the concept is easier to understand for a larger audience and everyone in the field is implementing the same thinking so it becomes are more commonly used "standard". I do however hope that at some point in time some of the recent changes are reworked because to me the idea behind plans it is to pick the data, algorithms and use compute power to calculate best run time for the jobs taking into account:

  • Run time
  • Last job result
  • RPO
  • Performance impact on client computer when using agent level backup to automatically start throttling resource usage to make sure application performance remains acceptable. If RPO is impacted it will send alert to inform admin to increase system resources.
  • Run backup related process with low system process priority but run restore related processed with normal priority
  • RTO (stream calculation and or possible chopping of the data into multiple smaller sets)  
  • Adhere to blackout window but to show alert when blackout window is blocking the RPO from being met. 

To summarize…… AUTOMAGIC PLAN :-)

 

PS:I still need to write you a mail regarding another topic. Hope i can make some time for it to outline my ideas. 

We’re on the same page.   We have the data and runtimes and rates of changes, its not too far fetched for us to do this.     My team expanded recently to include cloud/virtualization (and service provider) so if your ideas are in the realm, I can scale a little better than before!

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