Monday, February 7, 2011

Storix and SAN storage detection

As noted in the comments, this issue no longer exists since version 7.2.3.1. I want to also make it clear that I have been very happy both with the Storix software and with their support.

I ran into an issue in using Storix backup software. When beginning a backup, Storix does a query to make sure that / is not on an exclude list. It will query LVM volume groups to get this information about /. I discovered (with the help of Storix support) that SBAdmin by default will only query /dev/sd[a-z] for the root filesystem.
If you have the LVM volume group that the root filesystem is on, on SAN storage, the Storix backup will give an error similar to the following:

The / filesystem exists on the system but is not included on the
backup because it is in a logical volume you did not select to
include. You must include volume group rootvg on a system backup.

In looking further you may notice this warning in your Storix logs:

Volume Group rootvg will be ignored because it contains physical
volume sdba, which is not a supported device type.

This gives you the physical volume name that is important in the next step.

To fix the problem, on the client that is being backed up edit the file:
/opt/storix/config/device_info
There will be a section that is called "Hard Disk". Inside that section look for the line that contains the disk that your root volume group is on. In our example above, it is physical volume sdba. So we look for the line that is:

#disk:sdb:a-z::1-15:SCSI disk

Uncomment this line so it reads as follows.

disk:sdb:a-z::1-15:SCSI disk

If our physical volume had been sdey. then we would have been looking for the line that looked like:

#disk:sde:a-z::1-15:SCSI disk

We would have uncommented that line so that it read:

disk:sde:a-z::1-15:SCSI disk

When you have made this change, save the changes and retry the backup. At this point it should succeed.

4 comments:

san storage said...

Nice article! Thanks fot sharing!

sandy said...

Hi ,

I just ran into issue in linux , i am building oracle rac , i am using emc powerpath 5.3 , RHEL linux 5.4 i configured everything and turned over to dba , then i found that emcpower* names are not matching in both nodes , i tried to use emcpadm export from master node and emcpadm import on 2 nd node, but all the changes are not happening.the one that are used in vgs are not changing. i unmounted the filesystems but still names are not changing.can you help please?

David Huffman said...

Thad,

This is a great explanation regarding device detection within Storix SBAdmin. I just wanted to let you know, we have changed the device_info file to no longer limit the disks queried. This was only for legacy systems prior to udev. This is now changed in the software starting at version 7.2.3.1 which was released 10/07/11. Thanks again for the useful information.

Anonymous said...

Thank you Thad,

excellent doc, worked like a charm; good product this Storix...