CommVault 11 and VMware – ‘Virtualize Me’ Restores

Virtualize Me is a really useful feature that I’ve not had the requirement to use until recently. For any number of reasons, most companies still have actual Physical Hosts running normal workloads. They may not have been virtualized for a similar number of reasons. That’s life. I found myself with Continue Reading

CommVault and VMware – VSA Backup Filtering options

     There’s always been a number of ways to apply filters to VM’s and disks. It could be done at the Backup-Set or Sub-client level. This is a little bit clunky and can lead to unnecessary VM’s being backed up.  If you’re using a Capacity based licence, this is Continue Reading

CommVault – Upgrade DDB to Transactional Mode

The deduplication databases (DDB) are arguably the most important component in an efficient and fast CommVault environment. If you’ve ever had a Media Agent fail unexpectedly before the DDB’s were able to gracefully shutdown, you’d be well aware the the restore and rebuild times can be very long. In Version Continue Reading

CommVault v10 SP14 – Issue with Synthetic Full Backups

I recently upgraded my CommCell from v10 SP13 to SP14. As usual, the upgrade was easy. Centrally deployed, no issues. The next set of scheduled fulls kicked off a few days later, and soon after there appeared to be an issue with Synthetic Full backups. In the Job Controller they Continue Reading

CommVault – The need for speed, pt 1

Speed and performance is an important capability of a Data Protection solution. Most people logically attribute this to being able to finish all tasks in a defined “window“. I’ve used CommVault for a long time and it’s one of my all time fav’s. It truly does “what it says on Continue Reading

EMC RecoverPoint- Standalone VM Recovery

RecoverPoint is one of my favourite products. It’s unique, reliable and has helped me out of trouble on more than one occasion. Whilst most VM admins associate it with SRM and thus Site/LUN/Datastore recovery, it can also fill in an often overlooked gap in data protection. Pre and Post backup Continue Reading

Commvault Simpana – Automating DBMaintenance utility execution with qlogin and Powershell

Running the dbmaintenance utility regularly is a great way to get the Commcell database in ‘primo shape. Over time, data is aged, clients are reconfigured/deleted and this can all add up to indexes getting out of date, oversized tables etc. It’s recommended to do a Full DBMAINTENANCE operation every 6 Continue Reading

VMware ESXi CBT bug PT3 — ESXi 5.5 now fixed.

This now becomes the 3rd post regarding the infamous Changed Block Tracking bug that was/is evident in all versions of ESXi 4+. If you missed them, Part 1  &  Part 2 Finally today we see the bug squashed in ESXi 5.5 with the release of Patch ESXi-5.5.0-20150104001-standard (2099271). This still leaves Continue Reading

EMC RecoverPoint 4.1 SP1 GA & RecoverPoint for VM’s now Free to use

    No sooner had I written this post, EMC release Service Pack 1 for RecoverPoint 4.1 with the fix included. This is an important release as finally environments that are on 4.x have a validated upgrade path to 4.1/SE that will pass the EMC mandated change control process, which has Continue Reading

VMware ESXi CBT bug — FIXED, sort of.

I’ve previously posted in detail about the VMware ESXi CBT bug here It’s taken a while but VMware have today released patches to address this issue for older versions of ESXI 5.0 & 5.1 Disappointingly, still no fix for ESXI 4.0 and more importantly ESXi 5.5 (Rumoured to be coming Continue Reading