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2554
May 5th, 2017 09:00
Oracle ASM filesystem support
We have an Oracle Exadata that has an "acfs" file system, (not an Oracle guy here), which I now know is the ASM clustered file system. Our DBA's have place general non-DB type files out there, install files, utilities, etc...
Can Avamar back that up? The Linux client doesn't pick it up, which I didn't think it would unless there is a special flag to make it. And the Oracle plug-in looks to support the backup of DB's on those type file systems but I don't see any info on backing up other non-DB files/directories via that plug-in, unless I'm missing something in the doc.
Our DBA's were just wanting to know if Avamar can support backing their non-DB files up on that file system before that went another route, rycn or whatever. Thanks as always.
hatfield1
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July 5th, 2017 10:00
Did you ever hear anything back on this? We have a DB requesting a restore of his ASM-stored data and it's looking like we don't have it....
Clarkson14
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July 10th, 2017 07:00
After some research and running it by one our PE's, I think it was determined that it couldn't be done. Avamar would never pick it up, presumably because of the file system type it would see, acfs, which it was skipping.
Our Exadata crew ended up just using rsync to send a copy to a Linux server and let the Isilon snaps back it up.
Now, I didn't push our PE to take the question all the way to engineering, so I'm not going to sit here and say for 100% certain there isn't some undocumented special switch to allow it, but the suggested workaround, below, was kluge at best IMO, and once the rsync solution came up we left it at that and didn't pursue any further with EMC.
There was a suggestion as a possible workaround, not supported, was to allow cifs or nfs access to one of Exadata nodes and capture the data there I think via ndmp, but tuning on cifs/nfs on the Exadata wasn't going to be allowed, and that was kind of a kluge solution anyways IMO.
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hatfield1
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July 11th, 2017 07:00
Yeah, we received a note from a tech that we could add --forecefs=acfs to the avtar.cmd and avagent.cmd files on the client to back up data on an acfs file system, BUT... he made a point to say EMC does not support this. We tried it and it worked, but am concerned about the fact that there's an apparent solution (cheesy as it may be), but EMC doesn't want to support it. The tech notes related to the --forecefs=acfs solution seemed to indicate that the lack of support might be due to engineering just not being able to test every possible file system or solution work-around, so we're working with our support folks to see if we can either get it tested and approved or if they can come up with an alternative to backing up acfs data. Just from investigating this one incident, we've come across other systems that are utilizing acfs, and we had 'assumed' the data was being backed up! (oops). Will see....