Installing/Backing up Windows Cluster

[rdphill]

Our Server dept has installed a new MS Windows cluster.

Active/Active unfortunately.

I have installed the file system idata agent on the two physical nodes. I cannot seem to get it installed on the virtual node.

When I connect to the virtual node via IP and run setup it detects the file system ida so I cannot go any further.

Am I wrong in expecting it to recognize this is a cluster and give me the cluster agent install option?

Thanks
Rick

 

[theravager]

cd 5 has the cluster agents

 

[Frbutler]

Also make sure you are on the primary virtual node (It was an issue in 6.1)
If you use the cluster cd and install from the primary node you get the install to virtual option.

My issue in the past with Active/Active has been that both nodes had to be on the primary in order to do the install

Phys1 primary
Phys2 secondary

All virtual instances had to be hosted by the primary node in order to do the install (6.1) Birky might be able to confirm and v7 changes to that.

 

[Frbutler]

once the install is completed, fail over the instance to the secondary node to regain your active/active cluster status.

 

[birky]

you have no 'virtual agent' licenses to be able to install on the virtuals...if you have some spare fs licenses then contact your sales account mgr and ask him to swap them



Birky
CommVault Certified Engineer

 

[Frbutler]

That was a nifty little "Feature" they did on the 5.9-6.1 upgrade. If you did a inplace upgrade it converted your standard FS agent on the virtual node to a Virtual fs agent.
BUT....it did not add/convert it in the license summary. So if you had to do a DR or reinstall it told you that you had no such license!! Grrr I found this out the hard way.

 

[birky]

Yep...can be a pain but, usually there's no problem in swapping some fs iDA licenses for virtuals

btw mate. you still need to install to a virtual from the owning physical node
so..
node A ---> virtual A
node B ---> virtual B

install virtual A from node A--virtual B from node B and then in 7.0 you can select to update the secondary nodes automatically with no need to perform a failover




Birky
CommVault Certified Engineer

 

[Frbutler]

I did not mean that you had to do a failover to install
6.1 installs to the passive/secondary node also.
But all installs have to be done from the primary node.
It wont let you install from the owner node if it is not the primary. Windows cluster services in general require you to have a primary and a secondary I think

Either way you will require a virtual file system agent to do the install
So a standard 2 node cluster will require 2 physical fs agents
and 1 virtual fs agent for each instance you are running.
then whatever app agent (SQL Oracle)

 

[rdphill]

Thank you for all your input.

Galaxy 6.1 SP4

I've installed the FS agent to both physical nodes which catches C and E drives

F and G are the shared drives

Node 1 owns F
Node 2 owns G

From node 1 I ran the cluster agent install and successfully installed it to the virtual that owns F.

From node 2 I can install it to the virtual name that owns G.

However, this doesn't seem complete to me. I am use to active/passive. I gather from Frbutler I need to failover everything to node 1 and install to all virtuals and then failover to node 2 so that ever resource is on that node and install to all virtuals again. Then fail the appropriate resources back to regain active/active status.

Thanks

 

[birky]

From your explaination, you have installed correctly..You shouldn't have to perform a failover unless the updating of the passive node fails whilst installing.(passive nodes are updated automatically during install)

Not much difference between Active/Active and Active/Passive except that each physical node is hosting virtual/s and is a passive node for the other.

Best way to test that you have installed correctly is to start a backup and perform a failover to see if the job resumes..there will be a slight delay though.



Birky
CommVault Certified Engineer

 

[dall]

Just a note, we have an active\passive cluster but while all indications are that the files are backed up on the physical and virtual nodes we had to define individual subclients rather than leaving the default in order to be able to see the files to restore them. Commvault are still trying to come up with an answer.

 

[rdphill]

Thanks for the heads up.

This thing is completely fouled up at the moment.

I couldn't get the second node to install to the virtual, kept failing with some error about "move data process: -115"
as well as others attached.

i uninstalled the cluster agent from the first node which had been installed to the virtual but not working for some unknown reason. Now when attempting to reinstall it, i am getting the commvault directory is not empty please select a different path. The drive is the shared drive so there isn't another path. When trying to delete the commvault directory, all goes well until galaxywineventlogmsgs.dll which will not let me delete it.

 

[Frbutler]

Aye, it would be smart to specify the content on your virtual clients. As Dall said doing a file system backup might not produce any browseable content if you do not.

I do not do this as the only virtual systems I have are SQL and exchange and they are covered with those clients.

I do not backup any file system data on my virtual clients.

 

[birky]

rdphill

Just rename the CommVault Systems dir to something like CommVault Systems_orig or something....then you will be able to reinstall

After you've reinstalled then you can safely delete CommVault Systems_orig



Birky
CommVault Certified Engineer

 

[rdphill]

Thanks for all of your input everyone...

Commvault engineer renamed the commvault dir and reinstalled just as you mentioned Birky. Also, dumb mistake on the second node. Local admin nor my login account to the cluster had been given read/write permission to the cluster resource I was trying to install the agent to.

Three days and a call to commvault to find that out!

Thanks
Rick