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2448
April 7th, 2014 19:00
Reusing older Avamar grid
Hi there,
Recently, I have a request from a customer who would like to use the older Avamar multi-node grid (might have been Gen 3 or Gen 4) which is not in production, to reuse it again. There are information inside which are considered not important to backup.
Questions:
1. What pre-requisites information gathering can I do to determine the harware type, specs etc? On hand, i still have a copy of the Health Check logs.
2. Should i choose kickstart to redo the system or a procedure that can "reset" the Avamar Server Software to its fresh state.
Thank you.
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ionthegeek
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April 8th, 2014 07:00
1. The proactive_check script records the hardware type. It is generally very accurate but it can guess wrong in certain circumstances, e.g. if there is failed hardware in the nodes.
2. Use the kickstart. This is the only supported method for re-initializing a system.
ajsg1
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April 22nd, 2014 01:00
HI Ian,
Just a quick question, rekickstart would be reinstalling the whole thing.
Is there ANOTHER procedure beside re-kickstart or doing it manually? That will set the current Avamar System back to "factory default" without any data but the configurations intact.
Thank you.
ionthegeek
2 Intern
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2K Posts
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April 22nd, 2014 07:00
There is no "factory reset", unfortunately. Re-kickstart is the only supported procedure for re-initialization.
You could allow garbage collection to remove all the data from the system but this generally takes longer than re-initializing. Also, parity stripes are always reported 100% full (even if they are empty) so the capacity percentage in the GUI or status.dpn will never go back down to 0%. This is normal. The empty parity stripes will be re-used.
ajsg1
16 Posts
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April 23rd, 2014 05:00
Hi Ian,
Many thanks once again for your valuable sharing.
ionthegeek
2 Intern
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2K Posts
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April 23rd, 2014 06:00
My pleasure!
ionthegeek
2 Intern
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April 29th, 2014 11:00
Well, they're your nodes and you can do what you'd like with them but a rack full of Avamar nodes is a very different beast from a traditional storage array. Each Avamar node is a discrete system and the Avamar software is the only thing that links them together into a cohesive unit.
I can't say I'd recommend this. There are a lot cheaper ways to get an Intel white box.
ds73826
2 Posts
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April 29th, 2014 11:00
Along the same line, I have four 3.9 TB nodes (ADS Gen 4)....and thinking about just converting them to raw storage, totally stripping out Avamar. Is this possible....basically, creating a new storage array?
ionthegeek
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April 29th, 2014 12:00
Happy to help.
The individual storage nodes could each serve as 6TB of RAID-protected storage but you'd have to worry about about BIOS, drivers, firmware, OS patches, etc.. Combine this with trying to balance the backup workload amongst the nodes and it sounds like the beginning of a management nightmare to me.
ds73826
2 Posts
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April 29th, 2014 12:00
Thanks, Ian. We are looking at HP's Data Protector to replace Avamar (due to cost), but need to re-purpose the nodes into storage that Data Protector can use. Since they also do dedup and compression at the client now, any type of storage can be used. Again, thanks....I appreciate you quick reply!