Storage and Deduplication

I was teaching a CV Engineer trainingsome time ago, using a lab setup for demos that I upgraded from 11.32 to 11.40. I created a disk storage pool to demo things. When I started to configure dedupe, I only got the possibility to choose the MA for the DDB, not the location (vloume / folder), so the DDB ended on the C: drive. Is this because the upgrade went wrong, or is this by design? If it's by design, why???

I have a customer running 11.40 and Commvault now has the combo tiers for cloud storage configured by default. My question resides in which tier the bucket should be created. The customer had previously created a bucket in AWS (this may come into play later) that was used to create a Cloud Library in Commvault using the AWS Glacier Deep Archive tier. When examining the data in the bucket, we can see the CHUNK data is written to Glacier Deep Archive however, the index metadata is showing under Glacier Instant Retrieval. This seems wrong to me.I have read that Commvault will apply an Amazon storage class header to every upload API call and then writes the data to the bucket, which is part of what is allowing the CHUNK data to be written to one tier with the index metadata to another tier. I’m starting to believe that the storage class header only is being applied to the CHUNK data and the metadata is using whichever storage tier the AWS S3 bucket was created with. Documentation doesn’t m

EnvironmentCommvault Version: 11.40.51 Windows Server CommServe and MediaAgent installed on the same server Primary Storage: Disk Library (Deduplication Enabled) Secondary Copy (Copy-2): Remote Disk Library (Deduplication Enabled) Copy-2 uses its own Global Deduplication PolicyDisaster Recovery Test ScenarioConfigure a Primary Deduplicated Disk Library. Configure an Auxiliary Copy (Copy-2) to a remote deduplicated Disk Library. Run backups successfully. Run Auxiliary Copy successfully. Create a CommServe Disaster Recovery Backup. Simulate a complete disaster: Original CommServe is lost. Original MediaAgent is lost. Original DDB files are completely lost. The remote Copy-2 Disk Library (Chunk Store) remains intact. Install Commvault 11.40.51 on a new Windows server. Restore the CommServe using the DR Backup. Reconnect the existing remote Disk Library.Current StatusAfter DR recovery:CommServe recovery completed successfully. Storage Policies were restored. Disk Library was restored an

Dear Community,Perhaps anyone can answer me the following question. My customer use storage accelerator (SA)  for backups and Aux copies to cloud. Now he asked:How can I easy see that SA was used or not?We are at 11.36.55. First, I asked Arlie but answer seems only partly correct. I am still at the beginning to check all points Arlie told me. Java GUI is not useful in this case. It shows allegedly only results if SA is used. To make a clear statement, I always must check the log file.In the command center, I must differentiate between backup jobs and Aux copy jobs.Backup jobs indeed have a line: storage accelerator yes/no which is the expected behavior.According to Arlie, there should also be a line for Aux copy jobs that clearly indicates the use of SA.I am not able to find. Can you help?My customer needs a clear indication on user level that shows if an aux copy uses the SA or not.We currently analyze logs or the network traffic to get clear results which is not useful. Thanks in adv

Hi everyone,I'm looking for some advice regarding a tape backup issue in Commvault.Environment:    Commvault Web Console v11.40.42    HPE Ultrium LTO-6 standalone tape driveThis tape drive was previously used in another backup solution. Before using it with Commvault, I:    Stamped the tape media.    Used the Delete and Reuse option to erase the existing contents.    Set the tape as Primary media.    Started a backup job.The first backup completes successfully and writes about 1.16 TB of data. However, after the backup finishes, the tape media is usually marked as Unavailable, and sometimes it is marked as Full.From my understanding, an LTO-6 tape should have a native capacity of around 2.5 TB, so I'm not sure why Commvault considers the tape full after only about 1.16 TB of backup data.When I start another backup job, Commvault prompts me to insert a new tape instead of continuing to write to the current tape.I also noticed the following:    If I power cycle the tape drive, the tape a

Commvault Backup & Recovery 11.40 (Command Center - browser-based) when backing up a Windows file server to an HPE tape drive.Environment:Commvault Backup & Recovery 11.40 Browser-based Command Center Backup target: HPE tape drive/library Workload: File Server backup to tapeIssue:During or after the backup job, the HPE tape is automatically ejected. This does not happen every time, but it occurs frequently enough to interrupt our backup operations. 

Good day to you all,I am experiencing with our Dell EMC PowerScale NDMP IntelliSnap backups across our two CommCell environments.Context: We have two CommCell environments configured to back up Dell EMC PowerScale shares to a HyperScale target. Currently, the shares are split between the two CommCells.The Issue: While the snapshot backups for both CommCells complete successfully, the Backup Copy job for CommCell 1 is consistently failing.Upon investigation, we identified that for CommCell 1, the data movement from the PowerScale server to the MediaAgent is defaulting to a higher-end port/interface instead of the expected 10000 port. Interestingly, CommCell 2 is configured similarly and is performing its backup copies without any issues. Kindly advise on this. Robert.R

We recently migrated our Commserve to a new physical server and now several weeks post migration we are getting errors on about 90% of our synthetic fulls when they reach the end of the job, they will continously run at 99% but looking at the synth full logs we see alot of this:30236 5280 06/05 12:34:18 13071395 SdtDecryption::ProcessBuffer:218 Cannot decrypt data for afid [28434509]. cur_afid [28725857], orig_afid [28434509]30236 574c 06/05 12:34:18 13071395 SdtDecryption::ProcessBuffer:218 Cannot decrypt data for afid [28434509]. cur_afid [28725857], orig_afid [28434509] The event viewer gives the generic Unable to communicate with Media Agent or Pipeline error. Opened a high priority ticket about a month ago and we’re being told we need to seal every DDB store in our environment and re-base. We have several thousands of VMs with some over 60TB in size. I feel like re-basing is going to take weeks, and we may not even have enough storage to do it. Any other thoughts or ideas would be

Hi,How may I know if my Aix environment is supported with DataDomain DDBoost over fiber?  Commvault Version: 11.40 release 22Commvault Media Agent SO: AIX 7.1/7.2 We have a large Oracle DB with 50Tb that we would like to protect.

Hi all, I’m planning on replacing our MA server, and I just needed a sanity check on the Replace Media Agent App and Move Mount Point processes. The old MA has a Disk Library with 7 mounth paths, most of which are iSCSI LUNs from a couple different arrays. The new MA will have much more direct attached storage, so I’m plannin on just 2 mount points. If I run the Replace Meda Agent App process, and let it run the Move Mount Point process, am I able to consolidate the old mount paths down to 2 during this process, and specify the destination of each of the source MP’s?  I assumed that I can because the Move Mount Path function in the Commcell console offers me the option to move it to an existing device, however the documentation says: The move mount path operation overwrites the destination mount path. Therefore, ensure that the destination mount path is an empty folder.  Can anyone offer any clafification?Thanks!

NetApp is currently selling the successor to the ASA (SAN Only), the ASAr2, at an attractive price. Basically, it is a system from the ONTAP family, like the FAS or AFF systems. Unfortunately, the API has changed considerably, and Commvault does not yet support the ASAr2 API. I’ve heard that integration is being worked on. Is there a timeline for this?We have a few projects where Commvault (new customer) and NetApp would be a good combination.

Can Commvault store full backups and incremental backups in separate buckets, with immutability enabled only for the full backup bucket, to optimize costs? If feasible, what are the pros, cons, and key considerations of this design?

The topic generally covers a few points.We have an “older” backup system, running Windows Server with “suitable” hardware specs, containing >50 TB of storage. No cloud stuff etc. but an LTO-9 library attached.Why is the fragmentation so high at all. I’ve configured allocation of writeblocks to 1024 MB. But it seems to clearly not do - or keep - that. I hoped to find help in:  But the recommendation to use “space reclamaition” instead of defragmenting sounds like someone has no clue about the topic. If my library is “full”, I can’t reclaim anything and by that it does not help the fragmentation-status the tiniest bit. For DR-use, we not only save the dr-backups (config etc.) but also have a scheduled job running, that backs up (copies) all library-files from storage to our tape library (also enabling us to airgap data frequently - good for ransomware attacks). But due to the fragmentation, our backup process is limited by the RAID containing the library. It’s still “spinning rust”

Hello community, we used a deduplicated WORM cloud storage pool  for a while but needed to start fresh because of unexpected growth.In the process of aging the data of the old pool we noticed an issue because of the default 1 cycle retention which required a workaround to bypass the cycle retention.Therefore we would like to enable zero cycle retention on the new WORM pool like described here: Configuring WORM Storage LockWhen preparing the pool and assigning the first storage policy to it I noticed that the cycle retention got increased to 1 after enabling WORM despite running the command from the documentation beforehand.So my question is: Is there more to do than described in the documentation to enable the zero cycle retention on WORM pools or is the GUI just “showing” 1 cycle but using 0 in the background?

What fields/tables  are used to decide the copy type of an StoragePlicyCopy : “snap primary”,”primary”, “selective”,”synchronous”,… 

We have a client sitting in a DMZ that can successfully connect to media agent 01. However, media agent 01 does not have a DDB. In the job logs we can see the scan phase for the job complete on MA01 but then it fails on the backup phase. We noticed in the logs an attempt to connect to the CVD service on media agent 02 which houses the DDB. The client does not have a path to MA02. In this situation, does commvault require the client to have comms to the DDB media agent MA02? I thought that MA01 would handle connecting to MA02 not the client. How does Commvault handle the data flow in this setup?  Thanks!

Hi all, I would like to enable client-side deduplication on a Windows VSA proxy so that only unique data is sent directly from the VSA to the MediaAgent DDB/backup library, instead of sending all read data from the VSA and deduplicating only on the MediaAgent side.We are looking to this approach because the VSA proxy will be a VM inside an AVS environment, while the MediaAgent will be outside of AVS (as Azure VM).  Could you please help with:Required packages on Windows VSA proxy: What Commvault packages are needed on the Windows server acting as VSA proxy to support client-side deduplication (e.g., Virtual Server, File System Core, File System, or any additional components)?How to enable client-side deduplication for VSA backups: What are the step-by-step configuration steps (storage policy, subclient properties, etc.) to enable source-side/client dedup specifically for VSA workloads?How to verify client-side dedup is working: What are the step-by-step checks (job details fields, repo

We have decided to move our backup data to the NetApp AFF A90 and allow the existing NetApp system to age off in line with the retention policy.Could you please advise on how best to present the volumes to the MediaAgents—whether as block storage or via NFS? We would like to understand which option would be more suitable for our use case.Additionally, could you confirm whether NVMe is supported by Commvault version 11.40?

Dear Team, We recently migrated our CommCell server using the "Recovering the MongoDB Database Using the Mongo Recovery Assistant Tool for Windows" document. After the migration, the new CommCell server (Commsafe) cloned all configurations from the old server, including the old Disk Library, Mount Paths, and DDB entries.We have since configured a new Disk Library, new Data Path, and new DDB on the Commsafe server and successfully re-associated all subclients to the new Storage Policy. The old CommCell server has been fully decommissioned, and the old client win-i3vamh7fvl3 has been retired from CommCell Console.However, when we attempt to delete the old Storage Policy, we receive an error stating that DDB Backups are still associated with it. Additionally, when attempting deletion, the Job Controller shows pending/queued jobs tied to the old Storage Policy, which is blocking the deletion.What we need help with:How to clear the stale/orphaned DDB association left from the cloned configu

Hi,according to BOL (ReFS for Windows 2012 and Windows 2016), ReFS is supported for Disklibraries up to Windows Version 2019.Is there a reason to not extent the support to the recent versions of Windows OS ? (2022, 2025)Is it required to copy-out, reformat using NTFS, copy-back all disklib paths/volumes, if the server is upgraded from Windows 2019 to a more recent version of Windows ?This can become challenging if the disklib has not eough freespace available to temporary evacuate one ot its paths.BRKlaus 

Hi community, we recently deleted a deduplicated storage pool which was using a S3 bucket on our NetApp Storage Grid and had WORM/object lock enabled.This was nearly a week ago and we still see almost no space beeing cleared on the bucket.We are seeing delete markers being set (sometimes even multiple for some reason) but older versions with actual data are not being deleted.Also Commvault is still issuing S3 delete commands to the storage and the delete marker count is already higher than the count of actual object versions which seems weird. We noticed a recommendation to set up a lifecycle policy on the storage to delete non-current-versions which we did and now is clearing up some more space than before but still very slowly, but this is more of a storage side issue.Source: Configuring WORM Storage Lock We noticed correct deletion behaviour (physical pruning) in the past on other active storage pools with S3 object lock so my question is:Is it necessary to set up these lifecycle po

I came to a client recently that had a large backlog of aux copy data and problematic tape libraries. After some remediation I got the tape copy running on 3 drives while awaiting replacements for a couple of broken ones. The replacements were done and following the resumption of the backup the tape copy job will only select one drive. So there are 2 media agents, each with a tape library attached, one has 3 drives and the other has 2 drives, so 5 in total. The storage policy has the 2 libraries in the path and 5 streams with multiplexing x 25. The drive pools on both libraries are set to use all drives. I cannot understand why it will only use a single drive since the backup job was resumed where it was using 3 previously. It now has 5 working drives which can all be seen in Commvault and all work fine in the Tape library GUI’s tests.Commvault version is v11.32.115. 

Hello everyone,I have a question.Since we don't want to renew our maintenance contract for our on-premises backup storage, we're now wondering whether we can run the entire backup data set, which is 89 TB, on AWS S3. Has anyone had any experience with this? What about read accesses during data verification and data aging? What kind of costs should we expect? Commvault mentions a value of 20 TB for data verification jobs, for example. However, I don't think that's realistic, since the data verification job only reads blocks. To reduce read costs from S3, there's supposedly the option of deploying a media agent in AWS to eliminate these costs. Does anyone have any experience with this?I'd like to get a rough idea of ​​the ongoing costs we can expect if we were to go this route.I would really appreciate any feedback.Regards, Thomas

Hi, We have a full Linux Commcell (Redhat 9.5) in V 11.36 with a 2-node Grid MA and partitionned DDB.Firewall is enabled and port 2049,2050 and 111 are open.When I start a ddb Verif, it goes to 50% successfuly, (local verfification) and goes in pending when it tries to validate the network path on the other node using NFS.If I stop the FW on the MA then the ddb verif finish with success :BEFORE :20679 51f2 04/23 17:43:04 #### initiateSession: 3dfs server @ [MA002] started successfully!!20679 51f2 04/23 17:43:04 #### initiateSession: Share MA002:/ma/MA002/vol01/JKOLPE_04.23.2025_11.14/CV_MAGNETIC exported successfully as /ma/MA002/vol01/JKOLPE_04.23.2025_11.14/CV_MAGNETIC_c1e0710d-b14e-46aa-b840-2e833e4a4d60_21 for session [22]20679 51f2 04/23 17:43:05 #### waitForNfsReply: Error: nfs_service failed for Session [22], revents: 0x1C err: -1->rpc_service: socket error No route to host(113).20679 51f2 04/23 17:43:05 #### didMountSucceed: Failed to mount MA002:/ma/MA002/vol01/JKOLPE_04.23

Hey all,We had two media agents on site A and site B. Site A’s media agent died and was replaced by the media agent from site B. Site B was consolidated. I have a Storage Policy GDP_xx that points to the dead media agent.I tried to replace the  MediaAgent in the Data Paths of the Properties windows, on the primary copy of the policy (the only copy, there is no other copy) We have a Dedup DB reconstruction job for this policy GDP_xx.How to stop this auto job from running? How can I disable the Storage policy?