Flex Appliance Resilience and High Availability

[Rachelzhu]

Flex Appliance uses container isolation, monitoring, AutoSupport, and Call home functionalities to provide resilience to NetBackup environments. Flex 5340 provides a high availability option with two nodes in one cluster to ensure your protection jobs can be restarted in seconds without the need to reconfiguring the media service policy to point to another storage.

Flex Appliance 5340 High Availability

Flex Appliance 5340 includes InfoScale™ Availability components enabling high availability support. When configured with high availability, Flex Appliance 5340 includes two server nodes in an active-active configuration. The server nodes communicate through redundant, direct, or cross-over 1GbE connections. In a high availability configuration, Flex Appliance checks the container status, all services on Flex Appliance i.e. NetBackup services and the system services are resilient. Check this Flex Appliance High Availability Demo with two HA nodes in one cluster to ensure your protection jobs can be restarted in seconds without the need to reconfiguring the media service policy to point to another storage.

Container Isolation

Container isolation prevents an application failure from impacting other applications. The containerized application architecture segregates network connectivity thus eliminating inter-service interference. Backup administrators often test new software versions prior to deploying them in service. Flex Appliance streamlines this process by enabling backup administrators to rapidly bring new versions of NetBackup online on the same hardware as the previous version is running for testing. After testing, you can simply replace a containerized application with the new version or run multiple versions simultaneously.

Monitoring the hardware from the Flex Appliance Shell

Use the Flex Appliance Shell to obtain information about hardware components. This interface provides tab-completed items to monitor your Flex appliance. Before you configure the appliance and your network, the system command is available to provide hardware monitoring information. For more information, see Accessing and using the Flex Appliance Shell.

AutoSupport and Call Home

Veritas AutoSupport enhances the support experience through proactive monitoring of Veritas Appliance hardware and software. AutoSupport also provides automated error reporting and support case creation and correlates the Call Home data with other site configuration data held by Veritas, for technical support and error analysis. With AutoSupport, Veritas greatly improves customer support experience.

Call Home provides information regarding appliance component states and statuses. Call Home is enabled by default. This chapter explains how to view information, configure Call Home, and delete or disable Call Home settings. More information about AutoSupport and Call Home is available in the Veritas Appliance AutoSupport 2.0 Reference Guide.