DPA to audit Avamar?

Question

Hey all. I'm looking to build some sort of report, custom or otherwise, to enable to to determine what clients I have on my Avamar grids that have never been backed up. When someone on the team builds a new machine and never remembers to add it to an Avamar policy, I can't tell. Has anyone found a good way to make sure all clients in your environment are being backed up?

thanks,

Wade S.

wsonnier · Answer

Unfortunately, that's not gonna cut it. I thought along those lines as well, but what catches me the most is folks who have remembered to register the machine, or add it to the vcenter image backup within administration, but have forgotten to add it to a policy. The way I currently check to make sure things are at least registered, is to go to "Administration" then highlight the vcenter instance, then click on the "protection" tab on the right. This will compare what's in Avamar vs what's in vcenter. It'll tell you in the protected column either "no, guest, or image". It's very helpful, but doesn't tell you if you're actually backing them up. I know there's gotta be a better summary, but I haven't found it yet.

thanks for the response!

Wade S

umichklewis · Answer

That's actually a pretty good question - if you have your vCenter in DPA, you should be able to generate a list of VMs. You can then match it to a list of registered clients in Avamar. I'm in the process of deploying a new DPA instance, so I can't check right now - hopefully this will help you get started!

Karl

wsonnier · Answer

I just re-read your post and realized I misunderstood. You said have Vcenter in DPA, which I missed! I don't currently, and I don't believe we're licensed for it either, so that might not end up being an option for me. I'm going to keep digging.

thanks,

Wade S.

umichklewis · Answer

Gotcha - I think you can add in vCenter without a specific license.  I don't remember having one for it specifically. Basically, when you add in vCenter, you can do host discovery and do a bit of reporting against that info.  You don't need a vCenter account with a lot of rights, just an account that can view storage. Thanks!

rprnairj · Answer

There is another way in Avamar Administrator GUI, go to Administration view, click on the vCenter, and then click "protection" on the right hand side of the screen, it will list out all the VM entities on a screen with columns, VM name, protected - Image/Guest/NO, Location, server and account (account is the Avamar domain if the VM is in the Avamar domain).

You can select all, copy and paste it to excel and then have your way of sorting it.

I am just sharing what I personally do during implementation phase. This could be a useful or unuseful way per your scenario.

Regards,

rprnairj

Data Protection Advisor

DPA to audit Avamar?

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