CommCell on VMWare

[jjjon]

Anyone running a CommCell on a VMWare virtual machine? Looking to do this soon for a 'mini' environment and wondering if anyone has any experience?

Thanks
J

 

[standiferl]

Are you talkin about the Commserve management console? If so it runs terrible its got SQL on the backend and he doesn't play very well with shared resources especially disks. Also there is quite a bit of chatter that goes on between the Commserve and each media agent (stream allocation, chuck acknowledgment, etc etc etc.) best practices is to use separate server for media agent and commserve but for almost a year and half we used the commserve on the media agent only went off b\c deduplication and verification and compression all made management of the commserve a terrible experience. Lots of commvault experience feel free to ask.

 

[jjjon]

Thanks for that. Wouldn't be putting MA on the same VM, would have a physical server that this. This would only be a test environment and wouldn't be used much, so I don't really care about the performance at the end of the day, as long as the CommCell will work on a VM.

 

[standiferl]

Should work just fine if its just a test enviroment i would go a head and put it on VM especially if you are going to be move production CV Db over to your test enviroment. Commvault requires that you remove everything except the Commserve when CV DB restore.

 

[hutchingsp]

Works fine IME, we're a small basic environment but had it running on a VM for a year or so with zero issues.

 

[Psy053]

As others have said - it would likely work fine in a small environemnt, however I would just suggest that you run both the CS and MA from the same physical host - it's tried and trusted, and you save yourself a Windows Server License.

 

[jjjon]

Thanks for the replies.

Psy053 - can't run both from the same server as the intention is to (roughly) copy the production setup which has a separate CommCell.

J

 

[hutchingsp]

Personally I wouldn't want a CS (and therefore SQL?) on a File Server, I want the CS where I can easily recover it and the MA where the data is, though of course that's just our situation.

jjjon - how many clients? As I said we only have a dozen or so but I was doing some monitoring over the weekend and whilst our full backups run the load on the CS in terms of CPU and LAN was next to nothing.

 

[standiferl]

Ok he wants to run CS and MA from different hosts because he wants to use commservedisasterrecoverygui and place his production Db on the the VM host and test with it? Does this sound right? If so he is right you need to seperate the CS and MA as the GUI only works when only the commserve is installed.

hutchingsp - CS and MA on the same host is tried and tested when you have that little clients but when you are like we are and have 300+ clients it works still but very very very poorly....

Les

 

[CraigMcGill]

Would echo most (but definitely not all) of the comments above.

The "CommServer" (not the "CommCell", which is the collective term that refers to all machines with CV software installed on them) can definitely run on a VM. Yes, some sites run their CS and MA on the same box, and it is indeed tried and tested, but this is not recommended by CommVault, and as one poster pointed out above, you wouldn't do that for medium to large sites, not just because of CPU and I/O resource usage, but for *MEMORY* usage (the CS is memory hungry).

> you need to seperate the CS and MA as the GUI only works when only the commserve is installed.

There are simple ways around this.

I have to disagree with the poster that advised against doing this. You are fine to put your CS on a VM - it works OK and it makes recovery very easy - no need for a second/DR CS.