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Hello, 

 

In our environment we provide storage target for RMAN backups but leave actual backup administration in the hands of Oracle admins. Clients are setup in CommVault with a storage policy with a retention of 30 days/1cycle and no schedule. Scheduling is handled by the DBA’s.

On certain databases we notice that jobs age out earlier than 30 days and DBA’s get notified in RMAN that the backups fail on the “DELETE OBSOLETE” step. We’ve previously contacted support about this and have the following enabled in CommVault: 

Again, this seems to only effect particular databases, not every database on a host has this issue. I’m not sure what else we could possibly look into? 

 

Hi @Rehan Bari 

If I got this right, all the backups are performed by the DBA from the RMAN interface (3rd application commandline backups). If this is the case the data is aged based on the number of days 

 

Some of the considerations for 3rd party jobs https://documentation.commvault.com/2022e/expert/53186_data_retention_rules_for_oracle_backups.html

Retention Rules for Command Line Backups

  • The third party command line log backups can be linked to third party command line data backups as well as any other kind of backup data as per regular data link rule.

  • Data from third-party command line backups ages differently than data from backups initiated through the CommCell Console. Retention cycles are not used for copies involved in operations from the third-party command line. For such operations, data is aged according to the associated retention time. You can manually set the retention time for each third party command line job from the storage policy copy. The command line log backups are aged according to the retention time set for its associated command line data backup job.

  • Command line full jobs are aged only when all of the incremental data backups in that cycle are eligible for pruning.

  • Command line backup are not eligible for extended retention.

 

Additionally, you can either configure the oracle backups to age either using RMAN retention or by Commvault Storage policy retention. Based on your requirements the following RMAN configuration needs to be configured 

https://documentation.commvault.com/2022e/expert/53211_data_aging_from_rman_command_line_for_oracle.html

You can manage Oracle backup data retention by using the RMAN retention policy instead of the CommCell Console data aging. You must perform the following procedures to use RMAN for data aging.

  1. Set the CommCell Console storage policy to have infinite retention when you use the RMAN retention.

  2. Specify the RMAN retention criteria with the CONFIGURE RETENTION POLICY command. See Setting the Oracle RMAN Retention Policy.

  3. Set the Disable RMAN External Pruning parameter to a value of 0 to allow the deletion of the archive files when you use external RMAN scripts to clean up the backup pieces. For information on how to configure the parameter, see Media Management Configuration: Data Aging.

You can configure an Oracle RMAN retention policy for each database. When RMAN retention rules are in effect, RMAN uses the criteria to determine which backup jobs comprising are obsolete and no longer needed for recovery.

If you want to use the CommCell Console data aging feature, execute the following RMAN command, which disables the RMAN retention policy.

CONFIGURE RETENTION POLICY TO NONE

 

 

Please engage your DBA and design this based on your business requirements.

 

Regards,

Gowri Shankar 

Thank you so much for this detailed answer @Gowri Shankar. 

 

Just to clarify - we allow DBA’s to schedule and run backups using RMAN, but we do not want aging to be based off RMAN retention. We want aging to be based off of the CommVault storage policy. In order to achieve this we have to advise DBA’s to execute the following RMAN command, which disables the RMAN retention policy correct? 

CONFIGURE RETENTION POLICY TO NONE

Hi @Rehan Bari 

Thats right, please note that all command line backups age as per days on the retention 

 

Regards,

Gowri Shankar

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