DDVE – TheVirtualBoi

How to: Upgrading DellEMC PowerProtect

In this blog post, I will show how easy it is to upgrade a PowerProtect Virtual Instance running within VMware. If you have ever administered Avamar before, you know just how painful it can be to upgrade.

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How to: Protecting Workloads with PowerProtect

In a previous blog post, I stated how to deploy DellEMC PowerProtect. However, once PowerProtect is deployed you must add a workload in order to start protecting data. In this blog post, I will show you the steps required in order to protect VM workloads within VMware.

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How to: Deploying DellEMC PowerProtect

PowerProtect is a Software defined data management software from DellEMC. It comes in two different variants, a hardware appliance with storage and a Virtual edition. The Virtual Edition must be pointed to a Data Domain. This software has been written from the ground up, and mainly competes against Rubrik and Cohesity. PowerProtect uses protection policies to protect assets. This software has been written from the ground up, and appears to have address a lot of the shortcomings that newer backup vendors poke DellEMC for. Personally (my open unofficial opinion), I believe this solution will eventually replace traditional Avamar/Data Domain/IDPA.

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How to: Upgrading your Data Domain OS (DDOS)

How to upgrade your Data Domain OS (DDOS)

Recently I was hit with an email indicating that my Data Domain had experienced a file system panic. The end result was a file system reboot during during backups.

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Alerts History

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Id Post Time Clear Time Severity Class Object Message

—- ———————— ———————— ——– ———- —— ————————————————————————-

m0-5 Tue Mar 13 18:29:28 2018 Tue Mar 13 18:29:48 2018 ERROR Filesystem EVT-FILESYS-00008: Filesystem has encountered an error and is restarting.

—- ———————— ———————— ——– ———- —— ————————————————————————-

There is 1 historic alert.

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After working with support, it was determined that the issue was due to an issue with memory allocation. I was given the below KB regarding my issue.

“DataDomain FS process (ddfs) may crash with memory allocation failures, but available memory still exists: https://support.emc.com/kb/489444”

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How to: “Space is running low in /ddvar. Please clear space or core dump capability will be disabled.” on Data Domain

“Space is running low in /ddvar. Please clear space or core dump capability will be disabled.”

Today I stumbled upon an interesting issue while prepping for a Data Domain upgrade. The first step taken to prepare for a Data Domain OS upgrade is to reboot the appliance beforehand. This ensures no issues are present before upgrading. If issues are present, they will most likely be brought to light before the upgrade. This is especially important if your system has been up for an extended period of time!

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How to: Dell EMC Data Domain Virtual Edition Install on ESXi

Finalizing this month’s series on data protection, I wanted to follow up last week’s blog post on installing Avamar Virtual Edition with this one, which is installing Data Domain Virtual Edition. The two are often married together in Data Protection deployments. Simply put, Avamar is the front end backup engine that has all of backup software, and DataDomain is the landing spot for the backup data. DataDomain is Dell EMC’s appliance based deduplication device. It is the market leader in purpose-built backup appliances. Various workloads can be ingested, including data from Avamar, VEEAM, Networker, etc. Like the Avamar VE, DataDomain VE allows you fully take advantage of virtualization in one easy to manage package. The virtual edition is geared towards small-to-medium size environments and/or EDGE locations (ROBO). With that said, let’s get started!

Be sure to check out the system requirements before you proceed.