Commvault Hyperscale Installation – notes from the field.

WOW, it has been 4 years since I blogged here, I moved initially to my own website but I am returning here for the time being sharing with you some goodies.

In this blog post, I will share with you some insights about Commvault’s hyperscale appliances.

Commvault Hyperscale, is state of the art storage appliance that allows seamless protection, upgrade and expansion of backup storage.

Commvault is expanding in Egypt and I had the pleasure installing 2 of 3 appliances currently installed in Egypt.

After fiddling with the appliances, I want to share some insights about those appliances.

Part1: Fujitsu OEM Hyperscale Appliances

Those are the original HS ones that comes from Fujitsu, the come pre-installed with Hyperscale OS and all what you need is cable and configure them.

Cabling the appliances is simple as you have either 2 or 4 10G ports and 1 Gb port for iLO, here are the tricks:

• 2 of the 10 Gbps ports will be connected to the public network and they will be used for data backups.
• 2 of the 10 Gbps ports will be configure for internal cluster communication
• 2 * 1 Gbps iLO will be connected to management network

Trick #1 is that production network must communicate with iLO ports, otherwise the cluster will not start, this is a pain in secure environments where it is a must to have iLO in out of band management configuration.

once you setup the devices and if you choose to install them with new Commvault installation (which installs RHEL virtualization and Commvault on a Windows VM), you will need to make sure the production network can reach your internal network, AD and most of the servers to backup them and join active directory.

Part2: HP DL G10 Hyperscale Appliances

Those are HP DL servers that comes with disks and you must install HS OS on them.

The first issue is don’t install the OS using memory cards, you must connect to iLO and mount the OS ISO using iLO and boot from it.

During the installation, the OS will enumerate disks, and it will detect the USB as a disk and tries to initialize it which will fail causing the OS install the fail, hence you must use the above method.

Once the OS is setup, configure the production and private NICs properly with required IPs, and connect the HS to existing Commcell server that you must install separately.

Notes from the field:

1- For HS OS (not the appliances) make sure that you update Commvault to the latest SPs and download Linux x86/x64 packages to the server the make sure to update the cache.

2- Join the appliances one by one to the Commcell, then update the remote cache of each appliance then update the appliance OS itself, then create scaleout storage.

3- Make sure that DNS names are properly mapping to the IPs of each HS appliance, otherwise you will see error (DNS name doesn’t map the device IP).

4- If you mistakenly configured the NICs, you can edit the nics configuration and bonding through editing /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts, do it carefully and edit it with extreme caution.

5- Check network configuration using ethtool and ifcfg utilities.

6- Firewalls are your enemy.

Happy installation.