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OVM Snapshot mount on OVM Manager during backup

  • 20 January 2022
  • 8 replies
  • 279 views

Hi, Everyone….

 

I am currently in my environment and we are backing up OVM virtual machines.

 

While backing up the VMs, commvault created a snapshot and mounted it on the production OVM Manager. It truncates it after the backup is completed. 

 

Is it possible for the snapshots not to mount on the OVM manager at all?

 

It actually affected production last time night. Please, help out

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8 replies

MichaelCapon
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Hi @Mubaraq,

With OVM backup the Disk from the Snapshot would be attached to the VSA Proxy VM for backup, then cleaned up after.

Is the OVM a VM itself here? - If so, is this being backed up?

Could you explain the “impact” that the backup had on production please?

 

It may be worth raising a case to validate what occurred here.

Let us know the case ID once opened.

 

Best Regards,

Michael

M
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Thank you, @MichaelCapon,

The OVM Manager is a physical server.

 

At some point during backup, there was a communication break between the proxy and the commserve. 

 

The snapshot could not be deleted from the hosts. Which caused duplication of VMs, and occupied disk space on the host as a result.

 

 

jbb
MichaelCapon
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Thanks @Mubaraq,

Was there a Snapshot/Backup taken of the Proxy machine? Or any observed hang/crash on the VSA Proxy at all?

 

Best Regards,

Michael 

M
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Hello, @MichaelCapon 

Yes, one of the administrators ran all the jobs at once defying the schedules, the proxy server crashed at some point leading to break in communication with the media agent and commserve. 

This caused the already created snapshots not to be truncated which led to high resource usage on the hosts and caused downtime.

 

A new proxy has been provisioned, the backups are to run in batches. We recommended that the resources on the proxy should also be increased.

jbb
MichaelCapon
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Hi @Mubaraq,

Apologies for delay in replying here!
A crash would certainly cause Snaps to be left behind and potentially disks still attached to the VSA proxy here.

For the Proxies, ensure that Automount (Windows) or lvm2-lvmetad (or other Linux Equivalent) is disabled. This is to ensure that the OS is not controlling the attached Guest Disks.

 

If you have any further occurrences of a crash, I would suggest opening up a support case also.

 

Best Regards,

Michael

M
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@MichaelCapon Thank you so much for your response.

You are very much correct. We have found out about all you’ve said overtime.

Below is what we did and the reports have been 100%, so far.

  1. We increased the resources on the proxy (planning on adding one more proxy for load balancing )
  2. We scheduled all of the 30 VMs to backup at once, but we put the data reader at 2, so only two hot clones is mounted on the hosts at every time of backup (we put the data reader at 10 initially, so it has an effect on the proxy and the proxy did not have enough resources at the time)
  3. We also found a way to filter the physical disks attached to the VMs, so the system does not attempt to snapshot it. We would do file system backup for the important files on those disks.
jbb
MichaelCapon
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Thanks for the update @Mubaraq 

Mike Struening RETIRED
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I moved the licensing question over here:

 

https://www.linkedin.com/in/michael-struening
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