EMC Elect 2014 Honorees Announced

Today EMC announces their 2014 EMC Elect members. I am honored to have been selected for the 2014 Elect.

You can read the official announcement here

Run time limits within NetWorker

NetWorker 7.6.0 and later versions have introduced a new feature called run time limits.

There are two settings shown below.

Soft runtime limit:-
This stops any clients queued in a group from starting if the time limit has been exceeded. i.e. Group starts at 11pm with 50 clients belonging to this group. The soft runtime limit is set at 300 (minutes), any clients savesets that had not started by 04:00am will be terminated.Customers may choose to utilise these features to insure production performance is not impacted by the backup.

Hard runtime limit:-
This kills all client backups within a running group, this includes index backups for these clients. i.e. Group Starts at 11pm with 50 clients belong to this group. The hard runtime limit is set to 540 (minutes), any client savesets running will be terminated at 08:00am.

Customers may have a requirement to get the media ready for shipment offsite at a certain time of the day.

How to backup all filesystem data on a Windows NetWorker Client without backing up the System State Savesets

How to backup all filesystem data on a Windows NetWorker 7.6.1  Client without backing up the System State Savesets such as:

• VSS USER DATA
• VSS OTHER
• VSS SYSTEM FILESET
• VSS ASR DISK
• VSS SYSTEM BOOT
• VSS SYSTEM SERVICES

In the ‘saveset’ field in the NetWorker client configuration, enter the keyword:

 all-ntfs

 This will cause all local NTFS filesystems to be backed up for this client while excluding the VSS system savesets (which are normally backed up if using the standard All keyword). 

Using only all-ntfs will not protect the Windows system state in any NetWorker version.  Disaster Recovery will not be possible for those NetWorker clients using only this keyword if the System savesets are not defined in a separate client instance for regular backup.

• FAT32 volumes will are not backed up using this keyword.

• In NetWorker 7.6.2, this keyword is no longer necessary as the VSS System savesets are no longer backed up as part of the ‘All’ keyword and are not needed for Windows disaster recovery.  These VSS savesets can be backed up when specified explicitly in the saveset field. 

Move the NetWorker Management Console database to new server.

Hi Everyone,

Yesterday I faced my NMC server is outof space and found the lgto_gstdb database oversized. I installed NMC on new server as well as moved the database to new server as below.
The procedure to move a NetWorker Management Console database to a new server is as follows:

• Install NetWorker Management Console on the newserver.
• When installing, choose new database to createa default database and update configuration files.
• If the NetWorker Management Console server is running, stop it.
• Delete the files in the lgto_gstdb directory.
• From the old server, move the lgto_gst.db and lgto_gst.log file to the lgto_gstdb directory of the newserver.
• Restart the NetWorker Management Console server.
• Backup the NMC database

After that update the License, peer information.