on 03-25-2009 07:24 AM
Story of Low Disk Space:
You have bought a new setup which is having 1 master and 100 more clients. All VERITAS and tape library configurations were done. With a big gulp of air you are initiating full backup for all clients and a green dressed running man initiated all client backups.
Backup is in progress for all clients without any issues and some jobs completed with status code 0 and 1. In some time all backup jobs get completed and you cross verified for the list of clients that completed with 1 and 0.
You are running backup in daily manner without any issues. Unexpectedly your Project and Windows admin guys saying that “we are running out of space in some servers and we cross verified everything, all seems normal; except one folder that located in all servers Drive named “NBU_CACHE” and its eating server’s space in GB’s“; You are getting into that issue and found that It have a hidden file and that did matter.
Project and Windows Admin guys forcing you to solve this soon as some servers are standing with out space in OS Drive too.
You have got a good knowledge in googling; you dig in Google and found a Net Backup document (VERITAS Administrator Guide 1).
You got to know the following details:
And also you found that VSP Snapshot will be automatically deleted once backup is completed and there you got a big doubt.
You don’t understand why the VSP not deleted automatically, so you are again contacting your master blaster GOOGLE for this. Now you got one Symantec technical document saying “Large files named "_vxfiVspCacheFile_x.tmp" or "_vxfiVspCacheFile_x.vsp" are appearing in the root d...”,with much more interest you are reading that document.
After a long read, you are getting some ideas related to the issue;
Antivirus is blocking Veritas from deletion of file
An exact scenario that was mentioned in the document is “Antivirus will scan for Virus whenever a file got created or modified, Whenever VSP creates Snapshot, Antivirus will start scanning that file to check for harmful virus; and once the backup is over Veritas will inform the client that backup is completed and just go ahead and delete the Snapshot, but When Client tries to delete that Snapshot file and operation got failed because of Anti Virus scan. So Snapshot is not deleted and it will occupy space in server as long.
And resolution as by excluding the NBU_Cache folder in Anti Virus Scan.
You got very happy by knowing this information’s but your mind voice forced you to contact Symantec Technical Support.
Then, you have raised a request with Symantec Technical support and your good time you got immediate response from Support.
Symantec support guy stared collecting the information about your setup, after a full study, he begin the case with some instructions.
VSP is a snapshot provider technology that was introduced by VERITAS since the days of WinNT. However with Windows 2003 we now have the Microsoft VSS which does the same job as VSP. You can configure Netbackup to use VSS instead of VSP for windows 2003 clients and for older clients you can configure VSP by excluding some files. Doing this will minimize the errors or conflicts with the Antivirus application.
Listed below is the compilation of best practices specific to VSP and VSS
>> How to ensure that the Antivirus application does not interfere with the VSP snapshot creation process?
>> How to remove the snapshot that is created in client drives?
>> How can you ensure that VSP is not installed during a fresh install of Netbackup client on a new Win2K3 server?
>> How to remove VSP from an existing Win2K3 server that already has the Netbackup client installed?
>> How to remove VSP in a clustered environment.
>> How to configure the cache file size when using Microsoft VSS?
(The following has been sourced from Symantec Technote … http://support.veritas.com/docs/276739
>> Some important links
After a long research and also based on these suggestions,
Most helpful and the excat solution for the issue which i am facing regulary. Looks like u have examined my problem and worte this article. Thank you very much.
Excellent document Karthikeyan
Excellent article!!!very informative and good write up, could not stop reading it at any time...Thanks a lot!!!
classic article!!!
Hi Karthik,
Very Informative, Thank you very much for sharing :)
Great information....
Great article which is addressing not just one issue. it is more informative than some guides :)
Such a nice and informative post, I was looking for all these what you have shared.
Thanks