Hi Everybody,
Hope you’re doing well and all safe !
I would like to configure High Availability for Media Agents.
I thought about a shared disk (FC) between two media agent, that way it will still restore in case one of them fails; But I didn’t understand what a SAN Data Server is.
Then I read about GridStor, not sure if it is the same thing.
My question is, what is the best way to assure high availability for my Media Agents? Thanks in advance for your valuable help.
Best Regards
Best answer by Jos Meijer
When you use LUN's which are assigned to 2 media agents in a non-clustered environment you should use mount path sharing as both OS cannot claim the file system at the same time.
Depending on the OS you will get optimal results using:
This way you will still have a dependency on the media agent which has the LUN assigned to the OS.
If the OS is down, access to the LUN is not possible.
Therefore you might want to shift your method towards a SAN Data Server setup which allows different media agents to access the same LUN's simultaneously, keep use of global dedup, allows FC connectivity and removes the dependency on specific Media Agent to access the LUN:
https://documentation.commvault.com/11.24/expert/9562_shared_san_data_server.html
Please note that there are OS and hardware dependencies when configuring this solution:
+23Hi
Gridstor (link below) allows you to have multiple Media Agents connected to multiple data paths for redundancy.
This way, if MA1 is down, MA2 can take over (and if both are online, you can have some balance involved.
Take a look at this document and see what the feature offers. I have a feeling you’ll like what you see!
https://documentation.commvault.com/11.24/expert/10842_gridstor_alternate_data_paths.html
Hi
Actually, I got a bit lost. The GridStor allows changing the path for a backup in case a Media fails.
What I am looking for, is how to make sure that both Media Agents have access to the same LUN without corrupting the data: I guess this is a prerequisite for the grid store. Or maybe it shouldn’t have access to the same LUN, I don’t know.
Sharing a mount path seems to be an answer:
https://documentation.commvault.com/11.24/expert/9374_sharing_mount_path.html
However, we are using SAN not LAN. But the link below doesn’t realy helps:
https://documentation.commvault.com/11.24/expert/9788_san_attached_libraries_configuration.html
Can you please enlighten me to better understand? Appreciate it a lot.
+17When you use LUN's which are assigned to 2 media agents in a non-clustered environment you should use mount path sharing as both OS cannot claim the file system at the same time.
Depending on the OS you will get optimal results using:
This way you will still have a dependency on the media agent which has the LUN assigned to the OS.
If the OS is down, access to the LUN is not possible.
Therefore you might want to shift your method towards a SAN Data Server setup which allows different media agents to access the same LUN's simultaneously, keep use of global dedup, allows FC connectivity and removes the dependency on specific Media Agent to access the LUN:
https://documentation.commvault.com/11.24/expert/9562_shared_san_data_server.html
Please note that there are OS and hardware dependencies when configuring this solution:
Hi
Thanks a lot for your response.
So according to you, the best option is to configure a “SAN Data Server”, which I guess is configured as below:
I still have a question,
Is “SAN Data Server” which I guess is mount path sharing, the best way to assure the High availability for Media Agents?
Thanks a lot for your help !
Hi
What do you mean by High availability : for backup ? for restore ? for both ?
Hi
At the first position, it is the backup; However, I still think that we must be able to restore at any moment even if one Media fails. So I would say both.
+17Hi
Your welcome 🙂
Based on your requirements this would be an affective method to provide a shared storage location via FC to multiple media agents and ensuring HA for both backup and recovery.
Other methods will require IP based solutions or will lack HA.
Looking forward to hear the results 🙂
Hi
It seems that I got my answer. Thanks all for your help, much appreciated !
Best Regards
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