Capacity Licencing

[Ajith_Sankar]

Hi Folks

  We are using capacity licencing for Netbackup 7.6.0.2. I wantes to find out the Front end data that getting protected because we have a plan to enlarge our environment by adding few more clients. We would like to figureout the data that is currently protected by Netbackup.

To find the Front end data, i have run nbdeployutil 

nbdeployutil --gather 

And 

nbdeployutil.exe --report --capacity "C:\Program Files\Veritas\netbackup\var\global\reports\20140811_084343_master.com"

it has generated an excel sheet with good amount of data. From the summary sheet i got below things but could not figure out which is the actual front end data.

is that 35.74TB or something else ?

Analyzed:
Master Server	Start Date	End Date	Number of Days	Total Clients	Total Policies
master.com	18/05/2014	11/08/2014	84	116	83
Total				116	83

Capacity Totals (TB)	Platform Base (TB)
Master Server	Calculated	Charged
master.com	35.74	35.74
Total	35.74	35.74

Capacity by Policy Type
Policy Type	Total (TB)		Client Occurences
Oracle	0.55		8
MS-Windows-NT	2.43		18
MS-SQL-Server	4.88		36
MS-Exchange-Server	16.19		11
NDMP	5.86		6
Enterprise-Vault	2.16		4
VMware	3.68		86
Total	35.74		169

	Flagged Capacity Figures (TB)
Master Server	Confirmed (TB)	Database Estimation	Possible Overlap	Multistream Estimation
master.com	7.45	21.62	17.78	17.01
Total	7.45	21.62	17.78	17.01

[AAlmroth · Accepted solution]

Normally there isn't that much overlap as indicated in your report (17.78TB out of ~35TB).

I think you should look at the Itemization tab in the spreadsheet, and look at a few selected clients, to see whether there is an actual overlap.Or you could run the utility again with the additional --use-bpflist option.

Maybe it will further reduce the uncertainty of possible overlap.

If you look at the Interpreting the result tab in the same spreadsheet, the definition for Possible overlap is stated to be:

"A client that is being protected by multiple backup policies has the potential to have the same data backed up more than once.  Compare the policy types and names to determine if the case warrants a detailed examination of the respective policies' backup selections.
Remediation:  If backup selections are being protected by more than one backup policy, find the redundant backup policies in the Itemization tab and make adjustments to the 'Charged Size' value.  Decrement the size by the value of the redundant backup selection, adding a comment within the adjacent 'Reason' cell."

/A

[Ajith_Sankar]

Could anyone help me to get this information with any easy way ? i couldnt track the size of the data even after reffering the related documents.

[Marianne]

I don't know what else is there to help you with.

AA has explained it. 
The report is saying that you have 35.74TB front-end data.

It is also saying that you may have data that is getting backed up multiple times because you probably have clients in multiple policies. 

You now have 2 choices:

1. Accept the amount of data as 35.74TB
2. Check clients in multiple policies and see if you have data getting backed up more than once.
   If so, clean up policies and expire duplicate backups.
   Run report again after cleanup.

[Ajith_Sankar]

There are lot many db clients that run on multiple policies policies. Is symantec recoments daily, weekly and monthly database backups should run on single policy or GRT enabled Full and Incr backups on single policy ?.

Anyways i cannot accept the 35TB of data which is a complete wrong calculation. If Symantec implement capacity licensing, there should have an effective tool to measure it.

[AAlmroth]

I guess you could always create an Idea here on Connect, suggesting NetBackup to do the job for you...

As there isn't only one way to do things in NetBackup, there is virtually impossible to create a 100% estimation in my opinion. Also, you have the responsibility to be compliant with the licensing, under the terms and conditions applied to the product, so you need to have full control yourself.

Let us go through two examples with databases;

Exchange: Let's say you have a 10TB information store, you most likely have split it up into several databases. So in the case of backing up on information store level, you would not have an overlap, as there is only one backup policy. But say you divide the backups in several policies, and specify the databases in each. Then no estimation tool can really wityh 100% accuracy "see" that you only back the Exchange server once. Then we also have the transaction logs, which sometimes runs several times a day in a different policy. Hence, you again may have overlap.

Oracle: Here we can potentially have the same situation as with Exchange. Very large databases, are often split up in several backup policies. Say you backup your active partitions daily, and all the read-only only once a month. Again there is a possibility of overlap.

So what you need to do (btw and you have all the required input in that spreadsheet) is too look at if say the Exchange server exist in serveral backup policies, then you look at how the policies are configured to see whether they overlap. You should also look at normal file backup of Exchange servers. Say you have not excluded the disks where the databases are, then you have a useless file backup of databases which are most likely online and being changed during the backup. But you have a usable backup in your Exchange policy. So here you potentially have an overlap.

So, in order to get a better estimation with the current nbdeployutil, you may have to "clean up" your policies, and create appropriate exclusion lists. If you run the util with the --use-bpflist, you get much better accuracy on file backups, as the tool can compare files in several backup images to remove overlaps.

/A

[Genericus · Accepted solution]

Agreed.

As NB admin - you have two choices:

1. spend some time and work setting up

2. spend some time and work cleaning up

If you have client in daily policy, and client in weekly policy, you will get double billed.

If you have client in policyA and client.domain in policyB and CLIENT in policyC - you will get triple billed.

Go to the itemnization tab, and sort by client name - check for duplicates and zero out the column 'Charged Size' - it will update the Summary page.

You could cut your bill in half.