The cheapest possible Data Protector support contract

Obviously, HP would like everyone to keep using Data Protector for as long as possible, and to maintain a full support contract on everything.

But let's say you've decided you don't want to keep using Data Protector. First up, I'm sure HP would love to hear from you to understand your issues. If you can't get the ear of anyone at HP, tell me and I can pass on feedback.

Now, you will end up in a situation where you have a history of backups that you might need to restore from, but without maintaining a support contract, if something goes wrong, you don't have anywhere to turn to.

So what's the cheapest way that you could keep a supported Data Protector environment? I think this would be with a copy of Data Protector single-server edition (B7030BAE). Last time I checked it was around AUD550 which included a one year support contract. The support contract part of this is only about AUD100 per year.

This gets you access to any released patches and also an escalation path in case one of those restores doesn't work.

There are a few limitations to single-server edition, but if you can live with them, this might be the way to go.

Greg Baker is an independent consultant who happens to do a lot of work on HP DataProtector. He is the author of the only published books on HP Data Protector (http://www.ifost.org.au/books/#dp). He works with HP and HP partner companies to solve the hardest big-data problems (especially around backup). See more at IFOST's DataProtector pages at http://www.ifost.org.au/dataprotector

Question from a reader about licenses

Today I tried Data Protector 9. In the Installation guide I read that earlier licenses cannot be used in version 9.0. Is it right? Even 8.1 licenses cannot be used? Why does HP changes license types so often making previous version unusable?

The install guide is correct.

A long time ago (in version 6 and earlier) you bought a license and that license would continue to work in later versions of Data Protector. Starting around version 7, HP changed their policy on this and each version of Data Protector now recognises licenses only for that version.

If you have a support contract, this is no big deal. You just go to webware.hp.com and rehost your existing licenses (any version) to version 9. If you are upgrading (say) from version 6.21 to version 9 by migrating to a new box, you can rehost to the new server and keep the old version running in parallel until the migration is done.

If for some reason your entitlement doesn't appear there when it should then it could mean one of two things:

• Your entitlement is assigned to someone else's account at your organisation. The licensing team at HP can do a search and re-assign it. I don't know about the other regions but the APAC licensing team are some of the most efficient people I've worked with at HP or anywhere else. Jianping is particularly amazing -- I've sent her emails, and within an hour had a customer's issue resolved -- and then she apologised for it taking so long!
• Your support contract has lapsed. This happens a lot where a customer bought Data Protector and then later on added some additional licenses; you will often end up with two different support contracts with different renewal dates. You might have renewed one, but not the other. If it's only happened recently, HP offer support contract catch-ups where you pay for the time that you weren't under support, plus a little bit more. Sometimes this is cheaper than buying new licenses outright.

Of course, if you don't have a support contract, then you don't get free upgrades. What you get is a perpetual license for the version that you bought.

I've found that a lot of customers have troubles keeping track of what is and isn't licensed, and tracking down licenses can be a bit of a challenge. Feel free to contact me (gregb@ifost.org.au) if you need any help with anything.

Greg Baker is an independent consultant who happens to do a lot of work on HP DataProtector. He is the author of the only published books on HP Data Protector (http://www.ifost.org.au/books/#dp). He works with HP and HP partner companies to solve the hardest big-data problems (especially around backup). See more at IFOST's DataProtector pages at http://www.ifost.org.au/dataprotector

Installing Data Protector client on MacOS 10.10

Data Protector 9.04 and earlier didn't recognise that they could install correctly on MacOX 10.10 (Yosemite) systems.

Here's my dirty trick around this.

Copy the contents of the HP-UX 9.0 DVD to the OS X box. There's a file called omnisetup.sh in the LOCAL_INSTALL directory.

Around line 265 you will see the following:

    *x86_64*)

        case "${OS_REV}" in

          10.*) SERIES="apple/i386/macos-10.4"

        ;;   

       esac 

      ;;   

That 10.* line is matching the operating system version. Edit it to add whatever version uname -a outputs. For 10.10 uname -a says the following :

Darwin osxbox.ifost.org.au 14.3.0 Darwin Kernel Version 14.3.0

So we need to match 14.3.0. 

Here's what I did:

    *x86_64*)

        case "${OS_REV}" in

          10.*) SERIES="apple/i386/macos-10.4" ;;

          14.*) SERIES="apple/i386/macos-10.4"

        ;;   

       esac 

      ;;   

Then you can run the installer

sudo ./omnisetup.sh -install da

The output should look like this:

  No Data Protector software detected on the target system.

  Packets going to be (re)installed: omnicf ts_core da

  Installing Core (omnicf)...

Data Protector software package successfully installed

  Installing Core (ts_core)...

Data Protector software package successfully installed

  Installing Disk Agent (da)...

Data Protector software package successfully installed

  Client was not imported into the cell.

  Please, perform the import manually

  Installation/upgrade session finished.


When that's done, you can then import the OSX box using the Data Protector GUI.

Greg Baker is an independent consultant who happens to do a lot of work on HP DataProtector. He is the author of the only published books on HP Data Protector (http://www.ifost.org.au/books/#dp). He works with HP and HP partner companies to solve the hardest big-data problems (especially around backup). See more at IFOST's DataProtector pages at http://www.ifost.org.au/dataprotector

Data Protector 9.04 released with lots of new features and bugfixes

As usual, you need a support contract, and then you install these patches over a vanilla 9.0, 9.01, 9.02 or 9.03. All the links to fetch them are here http://www.ifost.org.au/Documents/dp-patch-list.html

Notable highlights:

• There's a note that says that Automated Replication Synchronization is now supported. I think that probably means that my crazy mcfsend.pl and mcfreceive.pl scripts (to keep to cell managers in sync with each other's backup sessions) is now obsolete. In other words -- if I understand the feature correctly -- you can now have a cell manager sitting at the DR site and keep it in sync with the one in production.
• Apparently you can now have more than 1200 concurrent CRS sessions. I'd like to know what site found that bug.
• You can push out site-specific patches from the cell manager, as well as the normal HP-published ones.
• MySQL support. Now how hard would it be to add Postgresql support?

VMware highlights:

• Support for vSphere 6
• If you have Windows virtual machines with GPT-formatted virtual disks you can now use the VMware GRE (Granular Recovery Extension) with these.
• You can do snapshot backups of 3PAR LUNs; you can snapshot either end of a replicated 3PAR replication link.

Of course I'm available for consulting to implement these patches, or to help you upgrade from an older version so that you can take advantage of these new features.

Greg Baker is an independent consultant who happens to do a lot of work on HP DataProtector. He is the author of the only published books on HP Data Protector (http://www.ifost.org.au/books/#dp). He works with HP and HP partner companies to solve the hardest big-data problems (especially around backup). See more at IFOST's DataProtector pages at http://www.ifost.org.au/dataprotector

Configuring Data Protector with LDAP

I was happily following the instructions in the Installation guide when I hit a problem: the baseCtxDN that I needed to use had a space in it (OU=Acme Corp) and the Jboss interface doesn't seem to allow you to enter a value with a space in it.

The first step (on Windows) is:

jboss-cli.bat --file=ldapinit.cli

This modified C:\ProgramData\Omniback\config\server\appserver\standalone.xml . It is possible to edit this file by hand. In this case I had to log into Active Directory as the user dpuser, with a password of "Password-whatever".

I searched for the following:
  <login-module code="LdapExtended" flag="optional">

Then I added the following the lines:

<module-option name="java.naming.provider.url" value="ldap://ldap.acme.com/"/>
<module-option name="bindDN" value="cn=dpuser,OU=Users,OU=Acme Corp,DC=acme,DC=com"/>
<module-option name="bindCredential" value="Password-whatever"/>
<module-option name="rolesCtxDN" value="OU=Groups,OU=Acme Corp,DC=acme,DC=com"/>
<module-option name="baseCtxDN" value="OU=Users,OU=Acme Corp,DC=acme,DC=com"/>
<module-option name="baseFilter" value="(sAMAccountName={0})"/>

There's something wrong with the rolesCtxDN, though, as this lets me control LDAP users, but not LDAP groups. That is, if I have a line:

"" "gregb" "@LDAP_USER" * "admin"

in the UserList file, I can log in with my credentials. But if I replace that with

"" "Administrators" "@LDAP_GROUP" * "admin"

(which is what I really wanted to do), then on login I get a message about "insufficient privileges". Good enough for now, but I'll have to revisit this.

Greg Baker is an independent consultant who happens to do a lot of work on HP DataProtector. He is the author of the only published books on HP Data Protector (http://www.ifost.org.au/books/#dp). He works with HP and HP partner companies to solve the hardest big-data problems (especially around backup). See more at IFOST's DataProtector pages at http://www.ifost.org.au/dataprotector

Backing up NFS mounted filesystems

By default, Data Protector pretends that NFS mounts don't exist. You won't see them when you browse the mounted filesystems of a client machine in the backup specification UI. If you select the whole machine for backup, NFS volumes will be ignored.

The file to control this is /opt/omni/lbin/.util.

• For a Linux box acting as the NFS client, look at line 372. You will see the command-line options being passed to df -P listing the different types of filesystems that Data Protector is interested in. Simply add -t nfs anywhere in this.
• For an HP-UX box, look at line 366. You will see an awk statement matching the output from mount against vxfs, hfs, lofs or hsmfs. Simply add an alternative ^nfs|.
• For other platforms, try to find which pattern match in the case statement around those lines happens to match your operating system.

Be aware that many Unix boxes have an automounter for /net or /nfs so that any user simply changing directory into a subdirectory of them is sufficient for an NFS mount event to happen; and if you had requested a whole machine backup, then Data Protector will back all of them up to.

What would be really nice is to be able to exclude automounted directories, but include NFS mounts. I doesn't look too hard to do, but I haven't had anyone request this. Any takers?

Also, there's a very good chance that any changes you make to /opt/omni/lbin/.util will be over-written on the next patch or upgrade.

Greg Baker is an independent consultant who happens to do a lot of work on HP DataProtector. He is the author of the only published books on HP Data Protector (http://www.ifost.org.au/books/#dp). He works with HP and HP partner companies to solve the hardest big-data problems (especially around backup). See more at IFOST's DataProtector pages at http://www.ifost.org.au/dataprotector

How to make restore sessions not disappear

A client asked me today to help out with an auditing problem. They need to show to their auditors that they have demonstrated the ability to recover from a backup regularly.

But by default, Data Protector removes any restore session older than 30 days.

The magic variable is KeepObsoleteSessions and it is in /etc/opt/omni/server/options/globals (or on Windows C:\ProgramData\omniback\config\server\options\global or some variation depending on where you installed it).

I set KeepObsoleteSessions=3650, which means that they will still see their restore sessions 10 years from today.

Of course, they will also see barcode scanning sessions, backup sessions without media and various other irrelevant sessions, but they are happy with that.

Greg Baker is an independent consultant who happens to do a lot of work on HP DataProtector. He is the author of the only published books on HP Data Protector (http://www.ifost.org.au/books/#dp). He works with HP and HP partner companies to solve the hardest big-data problems (especially around backup). See more at IFOST's DataProtector pages at http://www.ifost.org.au/dataprotector