How to configure a 250TB Media Server Deduplication Pool (MSDP) on Linux and Windows

Article: 100038442
Last Published: 2019-07-18
Ratings: 8 4
Product(s): NetBackup & Alta Data Protection

Description

Starting with NetBackup 8.2, Veritas now supports expansion up to 250TB for MSDP pools on SUSE, Red Hat Linux and Windows platforms. This document helps you with the configuration:

The following are the minimum hardware requirements:

CPU:  A 64-bit processor with a minimum clock rate of 2.4-GHz is required.  A minimum of 8 cores are required, 16 cores are recommended.
Memory: Minimum 256GB . You may need to add more memory if you have additional Roles performed by Same Media Server. e.g. VMWare Backup Host, NDMP Backup Agent, Media is working as Master Server.
Swap:64GB
Storage
Metadata disk: RAID 0+1 is recommended, with at least 1TB of space.
Data disks: We recommend 8 mount points, each mount point must have a separate RAID group, a RAID 6 is recommended. Both the metadata disk and data disk should have more than 250 MB/sec of read or write speed.
File Systems: We support VxFS, XFS, or Ext4, but VxFS is recommended. Multiple file systems with a recommended storage space of 32TB and a file system with a storage space of 1TB.
 

Steps to configure the 250TB MSDP using 32TB volumes

  1. Create, format, and mount 9 new file systems - one must have 1TB storage space and the other 8 must have 32TB storage space each.
  2. Mount the 1TB file system at /msdp/cat and the 32TB file systems on /msdp/vol0, /msdp/vol1 and so on until each volume is mounted.
  3. Create a touch a file /etc/nbapp-release if it doesn’t exist.
  4. Create a sub-directory - ‘data’ under each mounted volume ex: /msdp/vol0/data, /msdp/vol1/data, /msdp/vol2/data, and so on.
  5. Configure the MSDP through the Storage Server Configuration Wizard. Ensure that the Use alternate path for deduplication database option is checked. Provide the storage path as /msdp/vol0/data and the database path” as /msdp/cat.
  6. Add additional 32TB file systems to the deduplication pool:
       /usr/openv/pdde/pdcr/bin/crcontrol --dsaddpartition /msdp/vol1/data
       /usr/openv/pdde/pdcr/bin/crcontrol --dsaddpartition /msdp/vol2/data
       .... and so on through vol7...
          /usr/openv/pdde/pdcr/bin/crcontrol --dsaddpartition /msdp/vol7/data

     

The MSDP configuration is now complete. You must verify that the deduplication pool contains the new volumes. Review the following command output to verify these volumes:

   /usr/openv/pdde/pdcr/bin/crcontrol --dsstat 2 | grep Mount
   Mount point count: 7

Configuring 250TB on a Windows MSDP server

  To enable 250TB support, create the following file:

    mkdir c:\etc

  echo Windows_BYO > "c:\\etc\\nbapp-release"

The sizing recommendations for Windows are the same as they are for Linux with a few additional requirements:

The DCHeaderHashSize setting in <MSDP Storage DIR>\etc\puredisk\contentrouter.cfg needs to be modified to be 2000000 / number_of_volumes. For example, with the full 8 mount points, set DCHeaderHashSize to 250000.

The volume used should be present as nested volumes, not as letter drives (C:, E:). Veritas qualified this solution using NTFS volumes.

Below is an example volume layout, each data# directory is a nested mount.

  "msdp_data" :["f:/msdp/data1" ,"f:/msdp/data2" ,"f:/msdp/data3" ,

   "f:/msdp/data4","f:/msdp/data5","f:/msdp/data6",

                "f:/msdp/data7"],

            "msdp_cat" :["f:/msdp/cat" ],

The crcontrol syntax is the same as Linux. On Windows crcontrol is located in <INSTALL_DRIVE>\Program Files\Veritas\pdde\.

For example:

C:\Program Files\Veritas\pdde\crcontrol --dsaddpartition f:\msdp\data2

Note: Veritas has defined the Maximum MSDP storage capacity. The information is referenced in the About MSDP storage capacity section of the NetBackup Deduplication Guide for Version 8.2.  Failure to adhere to these settings could result in performance related  issues due to data not being balanced optimally across all volumes.

Note: Support is for a pool size up to 250TB. A pool can be a smaller size and expanded later by adding additional volumes. 

 

 

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