Skip to main content

Hello,

 

Please, could you help me with the following question:

When adding a tape library to a set of non-clustered MediaAgents, I add the whole library to all of them and they decide which drive they are using, so there is never a conflict between mediaagents and drive utilization.

When adding disk libraries (SAN FC) to a set of MediaAgents, I add one disk library per MediaAgent because Mediaagents cannot manage the possible conflicts that could happen if they tried to access the same volume at a time (non-clustered MediaAgents). 

How does it work for NAS and cloud (s3) libraries?

  • For NAS, should I add one share per MediaAgent?  or just one share for all MediaAgents?
  • For S3, should I add one bucket per MediaAgent? or just one bucket for all MediaAgents?

 

Thanks.

Sergio

Hello @Sergio V 

Simply, you can share any number of MediaAgents to a single disk library or S3 mount path.

The amount of of disk library mount paths is completely dependent on your needs and the storage hardware. You can have 1 mount path with 10 Media Agents accessing it or you can have 10 mount paths with the same 10 Media Agents accessing it for example. A single Media Agent (by default) can handle 100 active streams which can be increased or decreased based on hardware specifications of the Media Agents.

For S3 the same applies. If you want all of the data in one bucket, you would create 1 mount path and share the other Media Agents to it. You can also have multiple mount paths within a same blob.

 

Thank you,
Collin

Hello @Sergio V 

Simply, you can share any number of MediaAgents to a single disk library or S3 mount path.

The amount of of disk library mount paths is completely dependent on your needs and the storage hardware. You can have 1 mount path with 10 Media Agents accessing it or you can have 10 mount paths with the same 10 Media Agents accessing it for example. A single Media Agent (by default) can handle 100 active streams which can be increased or decreased based on hardware specifications of the Media Agents.

For S3 the same applies. If you want all of the data in one bucket, you would create 1 mount path and share the other Media Agents to it. You can also have multiple mount paths within a same blob.

 

Thank you,
Collin

Hi Collin,

 

Thanks for the answer @Collin Harper .

 

Could one SAN FC disk be set ONLINE for several MediaAgents?? Normally, when servers are not in a cluster, you cannot share SAN FC disks between them (unless you set the disk as read/write on one server and read-only on the rest). Please advise.

Note: I am not considering the SHARED SAN DATA SERVER configuration for this question.

 

Regards,

Sergio

Hello @Sergio V 

To clarify, when I say “share other Media Agents” I am referring to doing so within the Commvault software. Not creating clustered storage through Windows.

 

Thank you,
Collin

Could one SAN FC disk be set ONLINE for several MediaAgents?? Normally, when servers are not in a cluster, you cannot share SAN FC disks between them (unless you set the disk as read/write on one server and read-only on the rest). Please advise.

Note: I am not considering the SHARED SAN DATA SERVER configuration for this question.

 

Regards,

Sergio

You cannot share physically attached block storage from a SAN between Media Agents - as you pointed out, NTFS/ReFS is not a cluster aware filesystem and data could corrupt. Technically Commvault can share storage because of the way it uses volume/chunk IDs and folders, but you need to use cluster shared volumes to share disks, and have Commvault configured to point to the CSV. Windows then brokers the writes and avoids corruption. In either case I think its better to have each Media Agent retain its own ‘write’ volume, and have a read only share from that volume to the other media agent if it needs data access or auxcopies or restores.

However to your original question - no issues having all Media Agents have read/write access to the same NAS/S3 path.

 

Reply


Terms & ConditionsCookie settings