Categories
Commvault Sys Admin VMWare

Commvault Simpana 9.0 with Granular File Recovery for Linux under VMWare

I am currently going through the process of installing a brand new Commvault installation. One thing I am evaluating is doing most of my backups via the Virtual Server iDataAgent, this will give me “bare metal” recovery of my VM’s as well as cover my individual file restore requirements. As at Simpana 8 granular file level recovery was only supported for NTFS volumes but with the release of Simpana 9 the documentation has been updated to remove the NTFS requirement. Also a nice little line that also says “Granular file-level recoveries are now supported for Linux-based VMware virtual machines.” under the new features in the documentation for Simpana 9.

So testing begins, and you would imagine given the above information that file-level recoveries for Linux would just work. Problem is it just doesn’t work out of the box, after hours of playing with settings and tick boxes and reading forum posts I finally found the solution I needed to get file-level recovery working.

Ok, so to get Linux backup working you need to add a registry entry on the Virtual Server iDataAgent proxy server (the documentation for which can be found here).

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\CommVault Systems\Galaxy\Instance001\VirtualServer

Then add the following DWORD value

LinuxMetadataSupport    REG_DWORD    0x00000001

Restart the Commvault agent on the VMWare server for good measure and now take your backup.

As for file system support it seems very limited. I have tested the following setups:

Ubuntu Host
sda1 /boot ext3
sda3 / reiserfs
sda4 /data ext4

Centos Host
LVM2 with partition formatted in ext3

The only file systems that backed up were the EXT3 file systems, LVM appears to be supported as well. One can only assume that EXT2 would be supported, but I haven’t tested this.

Overall this solution can only get better, as more file systems are supported and the option to backup the linux systems on a file level are brought into the GUI it can only get easier from here. Personally I plan on moving forward using the Virtual Server iDataAgent to backup all my VM’s that don’t have special applications on them (ie, database, AD, and Exchange).

Categories
Linux OpenSUSE

SUSE Studio

I have to say it has been a very long time since something on the web has impressed me to the point of being amazed. But today I found out about SUSE Studio.

SUSE Studio allows you to build/create your own Linux distribution based on SUSE linux.

“Build an appliance — or your own custom Linux distro — with a few mouse clicks. Customize it to your heart’s content, and share it with the world!”

Categories
Cacti Linux Sys Admin

Linode Network Stats in Cacti

Linode provides a convenient XML data feed that provides information about your CPU usage and Network Usage. The graph for the CPU Usage seems a little useless, but I have included it here as the XML feed provides the data.

You will need your linode account number to use the graphs, you can find this number by looking at the graphs provided to you in your Linode account management interface. The title of the graph will be “http://www.linode.com/ – yourhostname (linode12345) – CPU – …….”. You will need the text from inside the ( ) for your username ie linode12345.

Categories
Linux OpenSUSE Sys Admin

OpenSUSE Local Update Repository

I recently wrote a three part article on using Autoyast to automate the installation of OpenSUSE machines. I this article I will show you how to setup a local software update repository as well.

Categories
Linux PostgreSQL

PostgreSQL Performance Tuning

Well I have had my head buried in Postgres tuning parameters today. There are so many different options to look at and no real definitive guidelines out there, and to make matters worse you can really impede performance with incorrect tuning parameters which is probably counter productive if your interested in tuning for performance :-).

I have read a lot of blog posts and articles today and will list the ones I found most helpful below.