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New vCenter, Clients, subclients and existing data

  • 31 January 2021
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We plan on adding new ESXi (VMware) vCenters to our existing environment. During this our Virtual admins will be adding a couple at a time and then moving the existing VMs over so we will have the old ones in place and new ones.

I know I will have to deploy and configure the new vCenter (VSA) client and add the hosts and we use Folders. So the Folder names will be mirrored in the old and new existing vCenter environments. 

With all that being said how will Commvault treat the first backup on the new vCenter clients? Will they be considered full because they are on new hosts or will it see the existing data and only treat it like an incremental because of how the Global Dedupe policy works? I am curious because if everything is a “full” I won’t have the capacity.

Hopefully this makes sense. Thanks.

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Best answer by Damian Andre 1 February 2021, 20:37

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Userlevel 4
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Hi Bill,

The job will be FULL on the new VCenter as GUIDS won’t match anymore. In terms of deduplication however system should only backup whatever is changed. 

Userlevel 4
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With the capacity part if you mean Licensing then yeh Application size will be FULL. But it's about storage then dedup will help here as long as blocks are not changed. 

Userlevel 5
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Hi Bill,

 

Just FYI - doesn’t sound like the VM’s are moving datastores at any point during your migration but just in case, if you do have VM’s end up moving datastores, even the dedupe signatures will be affected as the data at a block level will appear different and thus new blocks will be written down to backup disk library. 

Userlevel 3
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Hi Bill,

Is this a vCentre migration? Like say from a Windows/Linux VM to a VCSA? When we’ve done this we effectively rip/replace the whole vCentre in one go and keep the same hostname for the new vCentre, this way it requires no reconfiguration in Commvault, and no full to be run.

As long as you ensure you re-create the role in vCentre and use the same service account it’s transparent, too (otherwise you can update the service account)

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It sounds like they are moving stuff over piecemeal so they are going to have both old vcenter and new vcenter available at the same time. 

 

Like Jordan is saying you will backup under the same machine name in Commvault I think but on the job running tab you will see the “reset” under CBT status which will mean you are running a full. Is that correct Jordan?

Userlevel 7
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Like Jordan is saying you will backup under the same machine name in Commvault I think but on the job running tab you will see the “reset” under CBT status which will mean you are running a full. Is that correct Jordan?

 

There is some info on that and migration to new vCenters in general in the docs: https://documentation.commvault.com/commvault/v11_sp20/article?p=32032.htm

Unfortunately, it sounds like a new vCenter client will be created, and hence a new subclient, so CBT will be treated as new and a full backup done on the initial job. I agree with Jordan though, from a deduplication perspective you should be good, and even though the job runs as full, it won't be copying the full blocks of the VM to the disk library - only the new blocks we’ve never seen before.

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So lots of good information and I looked at the link provided. We will be migrating the VMs to the new vCenter and using the same names for the subclients (based on ESXi Folders) so the names will remain the same during the migration process and no changes in the assigned datastores. 

It sounds like if they could keep the same vCenter names it would be easier for me but alas I do not think they are.

For my clarification so even though deploying the VSAC on the new vCenters, migrating the VMs and it running a first full that first full will only backup changed blocks because of how the dedupe runs. 

Is my summary accurate? Thanks everyone for the input and expertise.

Userlevel 7
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So lots of good information and I looked at the link provided. We will be migrating the VMs to the new vCenter and using the same names for the subclients (based on ESXi Folders) so the names will remain the same during the migration process and no changes in the assigned datastores. 

It sounds like if they could keep the same vCenter names it would be easier for me but alas I do not think they are.

For my clarification so even though deploying the VSAC on the new vCenters, migrating the VMs and it running a first full that first full will only backup changed blocks because of how the dedupe runs. 

Is my summary accurate? Thanks everyone for the input and expertise.

Hey @Bill,

Yes that is my assessment of it - the VSA will have to read the entire VM rather than query for changed blocks because of the new subclient (CBT is bound to subclient ID) - but deduplication will look at the data and discard most of it because we already have it - so only new blocks will be kept and you should not run out of storage

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