Commvault
VSA Configuration - Commvault Command Center
Carl Brault (Unlicensed)
tdopko@commvault.com (Unlicensed)
Quick Links to Topics:
Virtualization Solution Overview
The Commvault Command CenterTM for VSA provides a simplified management interface for administrators to conduct day-to-day operations to configure, protect and recover virtual machines.
Use the Commvault Command Center's Virtualization dashboard to check the status of applications, such as VMware® or Hyper-V®. This view shows information specifically tailored for Virtualization jobs. From here you can check the number of Hypervisors in your environment and the number of VMs protected. The virtualization dashboard also includes backup job summaries with details such as how many jobs were completed, failed or killed. The dashboard also provides a status of SLAs, and lets you monitor your Storage Utilization.
FR22 Supports the following virtual machines:
- Alibaba Cloud
- Amazon
- Citrix Xen
- Docker
- Google Cloud Platform
- Huawei FusionCompute
- Microsoft Azure
- Microsoft Azure Stack
- Microsoft Hyper-V
- Nutanix Acropolis Hypervisor (AHV)
- Kubernetes
- OpenStack
- Oracle Cloud Classic
- Oracle Cloud Infrastructure
- Oracle VM
- Red Hat OpenShift
- Red Hat Virtualization (RHV)
- vCloud Director
- VMware (vCenter or ESX server)
Key Features for Virtualization:
- Protect virtual machines in supported virtualization infrastructure.
- Quickly configure servers, storage, and collections of virtual machines to back up.
- Back up collections of virtual machines immediately or by a schedule.
- Restore full virtual machines, disks, and guest files with granular backup and recovery options.
- Monitor jobs, events, and alerts.
Virtualization Commvault Command CenterTM prerequisites:
- The VSA agent must be configured in the CommCell® environment.
- The Commvault Command CenterTM software must be installed in the Commvault environment.
Add a Hypervisor
Once the VSA software has been installed on all the desired access nodes, the hypervisor (also known as an instance) can be configured. One or many hypervisors from any supported vendor can be added in a CommCell® environment using the Hypervisors view of the Commvault Command CenterTM.
To add a VMware® hypervisor
1 - Expand Protect | Click Virtualization.
2 - Click the Hypervisors tab.
3 - Click to add a new hypervisor.
4 - Select the hypervisor vendor.
5 - Provide the host name to use to reach the hypervisor management server or host.
6 - Provide a meaningful hypervisor name to display in the Commvault Command CenterTM console.
7 - Provide a service account having administrative. privileges in the virtualization environment
8 - Select the VSA access nodes to use from the list.
9 - Click Save to add the hypervisor.
10 - Click to add a VM group and define which virtual machines to protect…
11 - If you click Skip for now the system will use the default VM group to protect all virtual machines.
12 - Type a name for the new VM group.
13 - Select the grouping type to use when browsing VMs.
14 - Check the boxes to select VMs.
15 - Choose a protection plan from the list.
16 - Click Save to create the VM group.
17 - The Overview page displays a summary of the VM group.
Virtualization Commvault Command CenterTM Overview
The Commvault Command CenterTM has an easy to navigate sidebar menu. Many sections are common to all solutions. The Solutions sections provide solution-oriented views, such as file servers, databases, virtualization, and endpoint.
To navigate the Virtualization solution
1 - The left sidebar menu provides easy to navigate organized menus.
2 - Click Guided setup.
3 - Click Virtualization box to open the solutions configuration screen.
4 - Expand Protect | Click Virtualization.
5 - The Hypervisors section provides information and tasks for all configured virtual platforms.
6 - The VM groups section displays information on configured VM Groups and available actions.
7 - The Virtual machines section provides information and tasks for all protected virtual machines.
Virtualization Subclient Job History View
From the VM Groups view | On the desired group line | Click the Actions button | Jobs
The job history of a subclient can easily be displayed in the Commvault Command CenterTM.
To view job history of a VM group
1 - Expand Protection | Click Virtualization.
2 - Click the VM Groups tab.
3 - For the VM Group, click the Actions button and choose View jobs.
4 - The view displays the history of backups, restores and Live Sync replications for the time period selected from the list.
Subclient Filters
Subclient filters are used to filter virtual machines or virtual machine disks. This provides the necessary granularity when using auto-discovery rules. For instance, a subclient can be defined to discover all VMs in a cluster, for which VMs not requiring protection can be filtered out.
To configure VM Group Filters
1 - Expand Protection | Virtualization.
2 - Click the VM groups tab.
3 - Click the name of a VM groups.
4 - Locate the Content section and click Manage. You may need to scroll down the screen.
5 - Select the Filters tab.
6 - Click to manually select VMs to filter.
7 - Select the browsing mode to use.
8 - Select the desired VMs to filter….
9 - …or click to automatically filter VMs based on rules.
10 - Choose a criteria to build the rule.
11 - Choose the operator to use.
12 - Define the condition to meet.
13 - Open the Disk Filters tab.
14 - Click to define VM disks to filter.
15 - Select the filter type to use which includes Datastore, Name/Pattern, Disk Node.
16 - Define the disk to filter.
17 - Defined filters are displayed in the Content section.
Collect File Details vs. Live File Recovery
In version 11, there are two available methods to recover files within a virtual machine that was protected using VSA backups: the traditional file recovery or the Live File Recovery, also referred to as the block-level browse or Live Browse.
There are differences between the two methods:
- File Recovery – indexes every virtual machine during the backup, which increases backup time but provides quicker browse and restore.
- Live File Recovery – doesn't require indexing during backup, which improves backup performance, but slows down browse operations since the virtual machine must be mounted from the disk library.
For file servers where browse and recovery operations are frequent, consider using traditional recovery mode, and for all other virtual machines use the default Live File Recovery.
The 'Collect File Details' option dictates which method is used. If it is checked, it uses traditional file recovery. When unchecked, it uses Live File Recovery. The benefit of collecting file details is to conduct faster browse operations since the indexes already exist. However, generating indexes on hundreds of VMs at backup time will have a negative impact on performance.
For Linux virtual machines, the traditional file recovery only supports EXT2 and EXT3 file systems. If the VM is using EXT4, JFS, XFS or any other advanced file systems, in such cases the block-level browse is the recommended method.
Note: This option applies only to subclients using V1 indexing.
To enable Block-Level Browse
1 - Expand Protect | Virtualization.
2 - Click the VM groups tab.
3 - Click the name of a VM group.
4 - Click the configuration tab.
5 - If enabled, traditional file recovery is used. If disabled, Block-Level Browse is used.
Copyright © 2021 Commvault | All Rights Reserved.