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Using MPFS with NetBackup

Dan_Mahoney
Level 2

Does anyone know if MPFS (EMC's multipath file system) is supported by Netbackup v7.x? 

In my initial testing on a Solaris client, the backups are failing whenever an MPFS filesystem is mounted, even though I am explicitly excluding it. I have added the MPFS-mounted filsystem in the /usr/openv/netbackup/exclude_list file, as I do with the other file that I want to exlude. 

It appears that the fact that the filesystem is mounted is enough to cause a problem, even though I am trying to skip it.

error message:

 

12/03/2012 10:29:48 - Error bpbrm (pid=22454) from client anovadb2-bk: ERR - Cannot write to STDOUT. Errno = 32: Broken pipe
12/03/2012 10:30:30 - Error bptm (pid=22457) media manager terminated by parent process
 
 
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RamNagalla
Moderator
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as per my understanding from the posts that i read, netbackup process will read the exclude list after reading the file list in backup selection.

i guess you specified ALL_LOCAL_DRIVES in the backup selection, so the MPFS file system will get read and cause the error and failures before it goes and read the Exclude_list file.(if the failure is really due to MPFS)

 trun off the multi-streaming if that is selected., if this did not help... 

you may need to try specifying file systems in the Backup selection and check the backup

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RamNagalla
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as per my understanding from the posts that i read, netbackup process will read the exclude list after reading the file list in backup selection.

i guess you specified ALL_LOCAL_DRIVES in the backup selection, so the MPFS file system will get read and cause the error and failures before it goes and read the Exclude_list file.(if the failure is really due to MPFS)

 trun off the multi-streaming if that is selected., if this did not help... 

you may need to try specifying file systems in the Backup selection and check the backup

Marianne
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Supported filesystems are listed in NBU OS Compatibility List:  http://www.symantec.com/docs/TECH76648

See sections called : File System Compatibility 

Please show us your policy config:
bppllist <policy-name> -U 

as well as client's bpbkar log. 
Rename log to bpbkar.txt and post as File attachment.

 

Nicolai
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Do you really mean MPFS or is it EMC PowerPath you have in mind ?

To my best knowledge Netbackup does not have a problem with PowerPath. 

Marianne
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Found this on Wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi_Path_File_System 

Certainly does not look like Posix compliant filesystem - more like a network-type filesystem.

Curious to see /etc/mnttab

Dan_Mahoney
Level 2

MPFS is a network-based filesystem, like NFS and CIFS. The concept is to use the LAN path for "meta data" and the SAN path for the heavy lifting. The obvious benefit (if I can get it to work) would be to backup large amounts of data (e.g. database dumps) from my NetBackup client without having to use my LAN bandiwidth. Using the 8GB/sec FC backend instead of my 1GB LAN that has much contention.

The mnttab:

bosnas02:/mpfsmagic     /mpfstest       mpfs    vers=3,xattr,dev=4c80012        1354561820

df output:

 

# df -h /mpfstest
Filesystem             size   used  avail capacity  Mounted on
bosnas02:/mpfsmagic    9.8G   3.5G   6.3G    36%    /mpfstest
 
"bosnas02" is the EMC VNX5300 File server
 

 

 

 

 

Dan_Mahoney
Level 2

Also, it appears that separating the MPFS backup to it's owning policy, and explicitly defining the filesytems include in the backup, instead of using the exclude list option seems to have solved the original error.

Must more testing to be done...