Welcome to Dell Technologies Power Protect DP Series Appliance.
In this session we are going to cover our Data Domain Capacity Resolution Path Part One:
Initial Check. This resolution path is documented in KB article 000192662, wherein we explain how
to manage the Data Domain capacity when it has Avamar backups residing on it.
So once you open up the KB login to the site you may see this attachments which has
the pdf doc. You can download this PDF doc to review the flowchart which we are going to go
through in this session today, as well as the flowchart contains links to various articles
that have been referenced, so it will be easy to review this flowchart once you download it.
All right, so let's get started with the flowchart now. So as we start you may see
instances where the Avamar maintenance starts failing due to Data Domain being full,
or there is, there might be an instance where our master is receiving integrity alerts,
or there is high utilization seen directly on data domain when it is integrated with Avamar,
that means it has Avamar backups residing on it. So in any of such scenario what you've got to
do first is check the Data Domain utilization and check which tier is occupying that high capacity.
Whether it's the active tier or the cloud tier. To check that you may log into the Data Domain,
you can also refer this KB article how to check utilization of a
data domain tier wise, because it's very important to know which tier is utilizing high capacity so
that an appropriate action can be taken against it. Okay so this KB tells about the same thing
that from Avamar if you log in and see the capacity you might see the total capacity so
you won't get to know which tier is occupying more, whether it's active tier or cloud tier.
But if you log into ACM and go to the protection storage component which is your Data Domain from
ACM or you directly log into the DD itself and go to the ‘Data Management’, ‘File System Summary’
you will be able to see the space usage tier wise, as well as total active tier cloud tier,
as well as total. And if you want to see the same through CLI there are commands documented
in this KB article as well. So let me quickly show you the demo of the same.
So one way to go to Data Domain UI is first login to the IDPA appliance manager,
that is the ACM, or directly log into the Data Domain itself using its IP or the hostname.
So here I have logged into the ACM, you may see the protection storage component,
and then you can log into the protection storage system manager from here. Once you do that you
will be redirected here, and then you can log into the Data Domain UI. Once you're logged in
you can come to this ‘Data Management’ tab at the left, in the left panel, come to the ‘File System’
and you will see the space usage in the dashboard, and it will contain tier wise active tier,
cloud tier, as well as total utilization. The same thing if you want to see from CLI,
we can even check that. So you may connect to the Data Domain CLI via SSH PuTTY okay, and once you
do that you may use the commands called ‘df’ to see the space usage tier wise, active tier cloud
tier as well as total. Since there are no cloud units configured here so it's unable to pull up
that information it doesn't have any information for the cloud tier to display. The other command
that you can use for the same output is ‘filesys show space’ it will also give you tier wise
utilization, active tier cloud tier and total. Okay if you want to see only for the
uh, helps us show space, if you want to see only for the active tier for let's say for example
then you can use this command. If you want to see only for the cloud tier the utilisation
then you will do ‘filesys show space tier cloud’ okay. And if you want to have further details
like for Data Domain, there can be maximum two cloud units that can be configured
on Data Domain, so if you want to see further details of each cloud unit utilization because
when you do ‘df’ or filesys show space commands it will show you the cloud tier utilization combining
for both the units. So if you have different cloud units existing and you want to see for
each cloud unit the utilization then you will do filesys show space cloud unit all.
Okay that is the command to see the utilization tier wise or for cloud units and to get those
details which tier is having high utilization. Now coming back to the flow chart now, let's see what
is the next step now. Once you know which tier is you having high utilization you've got to check
if that particular tier is having any cleanable size seen. How you check that is again you may
check that with the same commands files that show space or tier. Let's say for example active tier
utilization is high and it is 95 so for against that tier you will see the cleanable space.
If there is a cleanable space this cleanable space basically the cleanable size that you see
over here is the sum of post-comp sizes of the files that are expired, and these post-comp sizes,
please note is not the real time size of the of those expired backups it is the size that
has been recorded on data domain when the backup or when that file was first ingested. So during
the course of the files there might be dedupes that have been removed or expired or the original
files that have been expired so the post-comp or real time size, uh real-time utilization, of that
same file wouldn't be the same as that it was at the time of interest and that is the reason the
cleanable size is always an approximate value. But to get an idea that if the particular tier
has any scope of re-claiming space the scope is there when there is a cleanable size present.
So you would check if the cleanable size is present against the tier which has high
utilization that means it does have scope of reclaiming uh some space right, if there is a
cleanable size seen under the respective tier we go with the space reclamation. What if there is no
cleanable space or what if you have already gone through space reclamation and did not reclaim any
space and the available space is still zero and there is no cleanable space? Okay, and
though scenario, you got to first do the capacity analysis instead of keep on re-running cleaning
and you know still there's no available space. There's no point of doing that unless DD has
any uh scope of reclaiming space through expired backups, if there are no expired backups DD will
not get any opportunity to even clean, uh you know, make space for anything more, right? Make
space for any new backups. So first of all you got to do is capacity analysis. Now let's summarize
it. We have seen so far is we need to first check the utilization tier wise by logging into the
Data Domain via ACM or directly and then check which tier is having high utilization. If the
particular tier is having a high utilization then is there a cleanable size present for that um tier
or not. If there is then we will go with the space reclamation, else we'll go for capacity analysis