Data Domain

6 posts

Connecting your Dell EMC systems to SRS, the easy way!

Dell EMC uses Secure Remote Services (SRS, formerly known as ESRS) to enhance the tech support experience for their products. There’s two sides to this support: connect home, and connect in. Connect home is your device itself dialing back home to Dell EMC to report various things such as errors, automatic support uploads, etc. If either of this results in a Service Request at Dell EMC, a engineer can then use SRS to dial in / connect in and have a look at the faulty system. The latter saves you from having to host a Webex session.

Dell EMC likes to have all Dell EMC systems connected to SRS, again for two reasons. First of all, it reduces the time spent by engineers in troubleshooting an issue. If an engineer can dial in himself, without having to negotiate a Webex session with the customer, that means more SRs per engineer per day and lower support costs for Dell EMC. Secondly, it will result in faster incident resolution, and thus a happier customer. The support engineer can look up the state of a defective drive independently, and order new parts while the customer is sleeping. Win-win!

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Data Domain DD OS upgrade hung on phase 4/4

DD OS upgrade in progressI recently installed a new Data Domain DD6300. Part of the whole installation procedure is to run a DD OS upgrade to bring the system up to the target DD OS release. You can find the target releases over here. While running the upgrade to 6.1.2.20, the Data Domain correctly rebooted as part of the upgrade. Logging back in, the system GUI kept throwing an “Upgrade in progress” popup, blocking everything else in view. There is also an alert that shows “DD OS Upgrade is in progress. The system will not be available for backup and restore operations. The alert will be cleared after the upgrade operation is complete.” Which I guess is NEVER when the upgrade is hung…

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Data Domain migration and retaining your system name and IP addresses

DD3300Several of our Data Domains are end-of-life and need to be replaced with new hardware. In most of the cases it’s a small site with a small Data Domain that only holds roughly 1 month of backups. In these cases we just install a new Data Domain next to it, reconfigure our our backup software, and that’s it. After a month, the old backups have expired and you can switch off the old Data Domain.

For the slightly larger sites, there’s more than one backup client/server writing to the Data Domain. There are Oracle RMAN backups, SQL dumps, etc. Plus the retention of backups on the Data Domain is much, much longer. In these cases you want to perform a proper Data Domain migration which retains the name and IP address of the old Data Domain, so you don’t have to touch all the clients. Here’s how you do that, and a DDBoost gotcha you should be aware of!

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Data Domain DD3300: Bye LACP, Hello DDBoost Interface Groups!

DD3300I recently deployed a  new 32TB Data Domain DD3300 system. The initial configuration is easy and familiar enough. Connect to the system via the serial cable, setup iDRAC, and run the initial configuration wizard. Afterwards the rest of the configuration can be performed via SSH and/or the GUI.

While continuing with the configuration, I noticed I could not create an aggregate Ethernet interface. No LACP or Etherchannel! So what if my Ethernet interface goes down, for whatever reason?

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Adding Data Domain storage capacity

Data Domain DD2500Increasing the storage capacity of a Data Domain is usually a matter of adding an additional disk shelf to the Data Domain head. Upon  connecting the additional enclosure your new disks will be in an Unknown state. This does not necessarily mean there’s anything wrong with the topology of the system, but just indicates the disks aren’t in use just yet. This is however easily fixed with a couple of CLI commands.

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