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Veritas NetBackup™ Deduplication Guide

Last Published: 2020-09-14

Product(s): NetBackup (8.3.0.1)

About provisioning the storage for MSDP

NetBackup requires that the storage is exposed as a directory path.

Provision the storage as follows:

Up to 64 TBs	See Up to 64 TBs of storage.
250 TBs	See 250-TBs of storage.

How many storage instances you provision depends on your storage requirements for your backups. If your requirements are greater than one deduplication node can accommodate, you can configure more than one node.

See About MSDP deduplication nodes.

Optimized duplication and replication also can affect the number of nodes you provision.

See About MSDP optimized duplication and replication.

Other NetBackup requirements may affect how you provision the storage.

See About MSDP storage and connectivity requirements.

How to provision the storage is beyond the scope of the NetBackup documentation. Consult the storage vendor's documentation.

See About the NetBackup deduplication destinations.

See Planning your MSDP deployment.

Up to 64 TBs of storage

Provision the backup storage so that it appears as a single mount point to the operating system.

Because the storage requires a directory path, do not use only the root node (/) or drive letter (E:\) as the storage path. (That is, do not mount the storage as a root node (/) or a drive letter (E:\).

If you use a separate disk volume for the deduplication database, provision a 1-TB volume on a different mount point than the backup data storage.

250-TBs of storage

NetBackup supports 250 TBs of storage in a single Media Server Deduplication Pool on certain operating systems.

See About MSDP storage capacity.

Before you configure the MSDP storage server, you must provision the volumes. Each volume must conform to the following items:

Formatted with a file system that NetBackup supports for MSDP. The same file system must be used for all volumes.
Reside on a separate disk from the other volumes that you allocate for the MSDP storage.
Mounted on a separate mount point on the computer that you want to use as the MSDP storage server
Veritas recommends that you use a descriptive naming convention for the mount point names.

Steps to configure the 250 TB MSDP using 32 TB volumes

Create, format, and mount 9 new file systems - one file system must have 1 TB storage space and the other 8 file systems must have 32 TB storage space each.
Mount the 1 TB file system at /msdp/cat and the 32 TB file systems on /msdp/vol0, /msdp/vol1 and so on until each volume is mounted.
Create a touch a file /etc/nbapp-release if it does not exist.
Create a sub-directory named data under each mounted volume. For example, /msdp/vol0/data, /msdp/vol1/data, /msdp/vol2/data, and so on.
Configure MSDP through the Storage Server Configuration Wizard. Ensure that the Use alternate path for deduplication database option is selected. Provide the storage path as /msdp/vol0/data and the database path as /msdp/cat.

Add additional 32 TB file systems to the deduplication pool:

/usr/openv/pdde/pdcr/bin/crcontrol --dsaddpartition /msdp/vol1/data
/usr/openv/pdde/pdcr/bin/crcontrol --dsaddpartition /msdp/vol2/data
till volume 07...
/usr/openv/pdde/pdcr/bin/crcontrol --dsaddpartition /msdp/vol7/data

Review the following command output to verify the created volumes:

/usr/openv/pdde/pdcr/bin/crcontrol --dsstat 2 | grep Mount
Mount point count: 7

For additional information, refer to the following article:

How to configure a 250TB Media Server Deduplication Pool (MSDP) on Linux and Windows

More Information

Resizing the MSDP storage partition