Active IQ Unified Manager Discussions

Enabling Protection Manager only on DFM server

SCONSULTANT
3,146 Views

All,

I have a couple of questions regarding enabling Protection Manager only on a DFM server.  This would pertain to either DFM 4.0.2 or DFM (OnCommand 5.0)

1.  After a new installation, what options would be disabled in order to enable protection manager only.

2.  If moving from one dfm server to a new install, is an import of the relationships required?  How does the new configuration get the datasets, policies and schedules that were created on the old environment?  Will these have to be created again?

Thanks for your assistance.

1 ACCEPTED SOLUTION

smoot
3,146 Views

Yes, I think you grasp all the issues. You are correct, you can divide the load between two OnCommand servers two ways: by function or by splitting the monitored systems.

We generally find that having two OnCommand servers monitoring one storage systems doesn't cause a problem. Many customers use this configuration. SNMP and ZAPI used to be relatively expensive for ONTAP to handle but on today's hardware, it is rarely a problem. I'd recommend splitting by function (PerfAdv vs. ProtMgr). If you're concerned about the monitoring load, stand up your new server and just enable OpsMgr monitoring, then see whether you're seeing CPU spikes or latency issues on your storage systems. If all goes well, do the database backup/restore process and proceed.

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3 REPLIES 3

smoot
3,146 Views

I'm not entirely certain what it would mean to run Protection Manager only. What parts of OnCommand did you want to disable? Most frequently people turn of Performance Advisor data collection because that can be quite expensive. You do this by with this command
  $ dfm option set perfAdvisorEnabled=no

You can't run Protection Manager without running the Operations Manager monitors.

Regarding moving to a new installation, the typical procedure is to create an OnCommand backup on the old server, copy the backup file to the new server and restore it there. Once restored on the new server, you'll have all your history, all your datasets, policy and schedule configurations and there will be no need to rediscover any storage systems, relationships, and the like. If you go this route, be sure to stop the services on your old OnCommand server. If you don't, you'll have two servers trying to run your data protection schedules and they'll interfere with each other.

SCONSULTANT
3,146 Views

Thanks Smoot,

So if I understand this properly, if I create two DFM servers, one to contain PA/ops Manager and the other to enable Protection manager schedules and relationships, I will still be monitoring the filers from both servers.  In other words, I cannot just have monitoring enabled on one server and disabled on the other.  My purpose for creating such a scenario is to move the load created by PM to another server and seperate it from PA and monitoring/alerting.  The only thing that I will accomplish is moving PA.  From what you are saying above, I will still be monitoring/alerting with PM but in this case, the monitors will be enabled from both servers, thereby creating additional SNMP traffic.  It seems like the best way to achieve a load distribution, is to seperate the filers per given DFM instance. For example, if I have 20 filers with 1000 PM relations, configure two new DFM servers and have 10 filers/500 relationsips on one and the other half on the second server instance.  This is differnt than how I had initially planned to set this up. but may be the only way to accomplish this.

smoot
3,147 Views

Yes, I think you grasp all the issues. You are correct, you can divide the load between two OnCommand servers two ways: by function or by splitting the monitored systems.

We generally find that having two OnCommand servers monitoring one storage systems doesn't cause a problem. Many customers use this configuration. SNMP and ZAPI used to be relatively expensive for ONTAP to handle but on today's hardware, it is rarely a problem. I'd recommend splitting by function (PerfAdv vs. ProtMgr). If you're concerned about the monitoring load, stand up your new server and just enable OpsMgr monitoring, then see whether you're seeing CPU spikes or latency issues on your storage systems. If all goes well, do the database backup/restore process and proceed.

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