Enhanced Installer Scripts to Protect Oracle Databases with PowerProtect Data Manager
Wed, 24 Apr 2024 17:14:52 -0000
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Our innovations and support for our customers never stop. We continue to provide extensive data protection support for Oracle databases with PowerProtect Data Manager, and the following installer script enhancements are now available with PowerProtect Data Manager version 19.14 onwards:
- Interactive single script execution to install or uninstall the Oracle RMAN agent and PowerProtect agent service as a root user
- Silent install or uninstall script using command line parameters to install or uninstall the Oracle RMAN agent and PowerProtect agent service as a root user.
Let’s dive in for more detailed information on these script enhancements.
Interactive single script execution to install the Oracle RMAN agent and PowerProtect agent service as a root user
As a root user, you can use the install.sh script to install or update the Oracle RMAN agent, PowerProtect Agent Service, and BoostFS agent. This script also configures the Oracle add-on for PowerProtect Data Manager. These installations occur as a single script installation when run as a root user.
You can also run this script as a non-root user (Oracle User) to install the Oracle RMAN agent only.
The install.sh script guides you through the installation process and requests input, where required, as shown in the following example installation:
You can specify the preferred FQDN or IP address of the Oracle RMAN agent host and the port to be used for communication between the Oracle RMAN agent and PowerProtect Data Manager. The specified port must be from the supported port ranges 7000 to 7009, and 7012 to 7020. The ports 7010 and 7011 are used by the agent service message bus.
Note: If you do not specify a port number, the default port 7000 is used as the PowerProtect Data Manager communication port.
Note: Run install.sh -h or install.sh --help to obtain more information about the script operation.
Silent install using command line parameters to install the Oracle RMAN agent and PowerProtect agent service as a root user
You can include multiple options in the install.sh command to perform a silent installation of the RMAN agent, PowerProtect agent service, and BoostFS agent, including add-on configurations. The install.sh script accepts command line parameters and environmental variables and the installation can run automatically without user interaction. Run install.sh -h or install.sh --help to see more information about the command line parameters and environmental variables.
For example, the following command installs and registers the Oracle RMAN agent with system administrator privileges, installs the PowerProtect Data Manager agent, and BoostFS package. The command options specify the preferred agent host address, communication port, and configuration of the firewall exception rule. It also specifies the retention time for Oracle RMAN agent backups.
Uninstall both Oracle RMAN agent and PowerProtect agent service as a root user
You can run the uninstall.sh script as a root user to uninstall both the Oracle RMAN agent and PowerProtect Data Manager agent in the same uninstallation session. The script also unconfigures the Oracle addons. The script can guide you through the uninstallation process but can also accept environmental variables to complete automatically the uninstallation process without user interaction.
The following example shows the sample uninstall script executed by a root user:
Notes:
- If other agents are installed on the application host, it is recommended to provide "n" for the prompt "Other agents might be using the powerprotect-agentsvc. Do you want to continue the uninstall?”
- Run uninstall.sh -h or uninstall.sh --help to obtain more information about the script operation.
With this efficient script enhancement, install, uninstall, and update operations can be done hassle-free as part of Oracle database protection.
For more details about Oracle database protection enhancements with Data Manager version 19.14, see our technical white paper PowerProtect Data Manager: Oracle RMAN Agent Backup and Recovery.
Author: Vinod Kumar Kumaresan, Principal Engineering Technologist, Data Protection Division
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Using Dell PowerFlex and Google Distributed Cloud Virtual for Postgres Databases and How to Protect Them
Fri, 03 Nov 2023 23:27:04 -0000
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Did you know you can get the Google Cloud experience in your data center? Well now, you can! Using Google Distributed Cloud (GDC) Virtual and Dell PowerFlex enables the use of cloud and container workloads – such as Postgres databases – in your data center.
Looking beyond day one operations, the whole lifecycle must be considered, which includes assessing how to protect these cloud native workloads. That’s where Dell PowerProtect Data Manager comes in, allowing you to protect your workloads both in the data center and the cloud. PowerProtect Data Manager enhances data protection by discovering, managing, and sending data directly to the Dell PowerProtect DD series virtual appliance, resulting in unmatched efficiency, deduplication, performance, and scalability. Together with PowerProtect Data Manager, the PowerProtect DD is the ultimate cyber resilient data protection appliance.
In the following blog, we will unpack all this and more, giving you the opportunity to see how Dell PowerFlex and GDC Virtual can transform how you cloud.
What is Google Distributed Cloud Virtual?
We will start by looking at GDC Virtual and how it allows you to consume the cloud on your terms.
GDC Virtual provides you with a consistent platform for building and managing containerized applications across hybrid infrastructures and helps your developers become more productive across all environments. GDC Virtual provides all the mechanisms required to bring your code into production reliably, securely, and consistently while minimizing risk. GDC Virtual is built on open-source technologies pioneered by Google Cloud including Kubernetes and Istio, enabling consistency between cloud and on premises environments like PowerFlex. Anthos GKE (on GCP and on-prem), Anthos Service Mesh, and Anthos Config Management are the core building blocks of Anthos, which has integrations with platform-level services such as Stackdriver, Cloud Build, and Binary Authorization. GDC Virtual users purchase services and resources from the GCP Marketplace.
Figure 1. GDC Virtual components.
GDC Virtual puts all your IT resources into a consistent development, management, and control framework, automating low-value tasks across your PowerFlex and GCP infrastructure.
Within the context of GCP, the term ‘hybrid cloud’ describes a setup in which common or interconnected services are deployed across multiple computing environments, which include public cloud and on-premises. A hybrid cloud strategy allows you to extend the capacity and capabilities of your IT without the upfront capital expense investments of the public cloud while preserving your existing investments by adding one or more cloud deployments to your existing infrastructure. For more information, see Hybrid and Multi-Cloud Architecture Patterns.
PowerFlex delivers software defined storage to both virtual environments and bare metal hosts providing flexible consumption or resources. This enables both two-tier and three-tier architectures to match the needs of most any environment.
PowerFlex container storage
From the PowerFlex UI – shown in the following figure – you can easily monitor the performance and usage of your PowerFlex environment. Additionally, PowerFlex offers a container storage interface (CSI) and container storage modules (CSM) for integration with your container environment. The CSI/CSM allows containers to have persistent storage, which is important when working with workloads like databases that require it.
Figure 2. PowerFlex dashboard provides easy access to information.
To gain a deeper understanding of implementing GDC Virtual on Dell Powerflex, we invite you to explore our recently published reference architecture.
Dell engineers have recently prepared a PostgreSQL container environment deployed from the Google Cloud to a PowerFlex environment with GDC Virtual in anticipation of Kubecon. For those who have deployed Postgres from Google Cloud, you know it doesn’t take long to deploy. It took our team maybe 10 minutes, which makes it effortless to consume and integrate into workloads.
Once we had Postgres deployed, we proceeded to put it under load as we added records to it. To do this, we used pgbench, which is a built-in benchmarking tool in Postgres. This made it easy to fill a database with 10 million entries. We then used pgbench to simulate the load of 40 clients running 40 threads against the freshly loaded database.
Our goal wasn’t to capture performance numbers though. We just wanted to get a “warm” database created for some data protection work. That being said, what we saw on our modest cluster was impressive, with sub-millisecond latency and plenty of IO.
Data protection
With our containerized database warmed up, it was time to protect it. As you probably know, there are many ways to do this, some better than others. We’ll spend just a moment talking about two functional methods of data protection – crash consistent and application consistent backups. PowerProtect Data Manager supports both crash-consistent and application consistent database backups.
A “crash consistent” backup is exactly as the name implies. The backup application captures the volume in its running state and copies out the data regardless of what’s currently happening. It’s as if someone had just pulled the power cord on the workload. Needless to say, that’s not the most desirable backup state, but it’s still better than no backup at all.
That’s where an “application consistent” backup can be more desirable. An application consistent backup talks with the application and makes sure the data is all “flushed” and in a “clean” state prior to it being backed up. At least, that’s the simple version.
The longer version is that the backup application talks to the OS and application, asks them to flush their buffers – known as quiescing – and then triggers a snapshot of the volumes to be backed up. Once complete, the system then initiates a snapshot on the underlying storage – in this case PowerFlex – of the volumes used. Once the snapshots are completed, the application-level snapshots are released, the applications begin writing normally to it again, and the backup application begins to copy the storage snapshot to the protected location. All of this happens in a matter of seconds, many times even faster.
This is why application consistent backups are preferred. The backup can take about the same amount of time to run, but the data is in a known good state, which makes the chances of recovery much greater than crash consistent backups.
In our lab environment, we did this with PowerProtect Data Manager and PowerProtect DD Virtual Edition (DDVE). PowerProtect Data Manager provides a standardized way to quiesce a supported database, backup the data from that database, and then return the database to operation. This works great for protecting Kubernetes workloads running on PowerFlex. It’s able to create application consistent backups of the Postgres containers quickly and efficiently. This also works in concert with GDC Virtual, allowing for the containers to be registered and restored into the cloud environment.
Figure 3. An application consistent backup and its timing in the PowerProtect Data Manager UI
It’s great having application consistent backups of your cloud workloads, “checking” many of those boxes that people require from their backup environments. That said, just as important and not to be forgotten is the recovery of the backups.
Data recovery
As has been said many times, “never trust a backup that hasn’t been tested.” It’s important to test any and all backups to make sure they can be recovered. Testing the recovery of a Postgres database running in GDC Virtual on PowerFlex is as straightforward as can be.
The high-level steps are:
- From the PowerProtect Data Manager UI, select Restore > Assets, and select the Kubernetes tab. Select the checkbox next to the protected namespace and click Restore.
- On the Select Copy page, select the copy you wish to restore from.
- On the Restore Type page, select where it should be restored to.
- Determine how the Persistent Volume Claims (PVCs) and namespace should be restored.
- When finished, test the restore.
You might have noticed in step 4, I mentioned PVCs, which are the container’s connections to the data and, as the name implies, allow that data to persist across the nodes. This is made possible by the CSI/CSM mentioned earlier. Because of the integration across the environment, restoring PVCs is a simple task.
The following shows some of the recovery options in PowerProtect Data Manager for PVCs.
Figure 4. PowerProtect Data Manager UI – Namespace restore options
The recovery, like most things in data protection, is relatively anticlimactic. Everything is functional, and queries work as expected against the Postgres database instance.
Dell and Google Cloud collaborated extensively to create solutions that leverage both PowerFlex and GDC Virtual. The power of this collaboration really shows through when recovery operations just work. That consistency and ease enables customers to take advantage of a robust environment backed by leaders in the space and helps to remove one nightmare that keeps developers and IT admins awake at night, allowing them to rest easy and be prepared to change the world.
If any of this sounds interesting to you and you’ll be at Kubecon in Chicago, Illinois on November 6-9, stop by the Google Cloud booth. We’ll be happy to show you demos of this exciting collaboration in action. Otherwise, feel free contact your Dell representative for more details.
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Flexible Windows Bare-Metal Recovery with PowerProtect Data Manager
Tue, 24 Jan 2023 11:00:27 -0000
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In today’s enterprise, it is certainly not a surprise to hear of a mission-critical application server experiencing downtime or degraded state due to disaster recovery situations, such as hardware failures and cyberattacks. In such situations, bare-metal recovery (BMR) is obviously one of the best disaster recovery solutions. Most users rely on the BMR procedure to restore mission-critical applications, operating environments, and data.
With Dell PowerProtect Data Manager, BMR for a Windows server can be performed efficiently with just a few clicks. Before we explore more about Windows server BMR with PowerProtect Data Manager, let us briefly take a look at BMR.
What is BMR?
BMR, also known as offline recovery, is used as part of a disaster recovery plan that provides protection when a server or a computer will not start after a catastrophic failure. The term bare metal is in reference to a computer without a base operating system or applications. The goal of BMR is to bring a server or computer to the state it was in before the failure.
When is BMR required?
BMR can be used to recover from the following situations:
- To recover a server or a computer entirely after a hardware failure that has been repaired.
- To recover data to a new server or a computer after a hardware failure that cannot be repaired. The new computer does not have an operating system, and the operating system files must also be recovered from the old computer.
BMR of Windows host with PowerProtect Data Manager
Starting with version 19.10, PowerProtect Data Manager supports the file system agent to back up the disaster recovery asset and perform a BMR of a Windows host.
You can use BMR for the following operations:
- Physical machine to physical machine (P2P)
- Physical machine to virtual machine (P2V)
- Virtual machine to virtual machine (V2V)
With PowerProtect Data Manager, you can perform BMR by backing up the disaster recovery asset. When a file system agent backup is performed, there is an extra asset—”disaster recovery”—that is backed up. This asset includes the information required to rebuild the Windows system back to its state at the time of the backup. The data in the disaster recovery asset, plus volume information for those file systems that contain operating system data (critical volumes), are also backed up.
After the disaster recovery asset backup is successful, you can perform the BMR using the customized PowerProtect Data Manager WinPE ISO image. By default, each BMR backup is system state enabled.
Backing up Windows disaster recovery assets
After you install the file system agent on the Windows file system host and it is approved in the PowerProtect Data Manager UI, the disaster recovery asset is discovered along with the other file system assets.
After the disaster recovery asset is discovered in PowerProtect Data Manager UI, you can create a file system protection policy and configure it to back up the disaster recovery asset. A disaster recovery protection policy should contain objects to be backed up, which include critical volumes and system state recovery files.
After the disaster recovery asset backup is successful, you can perform BMR using the customized PowerProtect Data Manager WinPE ISO image.
BMR data consists of the following:
- The operating system files and all data except user data on critical volumes
Note: Critical volumes include the boot volume, the system volume, and the volume that hosts system state data, such as Active Directory and application services.
- All system state information
By default, each BMR backup is system state enabled.
To protect a Windows host entirely, we recommend that you back up BMR data for critical volumes and separately back up regular assets that contain user data.
Performing Windows BMR
PowerProtect Data Manager provides a custom WinPE image that allows you to recover a source host to a target host without installing an operating system. Because local disks are not in use by the operating system, the recovery process can replace files without conflict. The custom PowerProtect Data Manager WinPE image is based on Windows PE 10.0 and contains the NIC and disk drivers for the Windows versions that the WinPE image supports.
Before you perform a BMR, verify that the environment meets the requirements and that you have the necessary information.
Note: For BMR requirements, see the the PowerProtect Data Manager File System User Guide.
When a recovery of a system is required, you can download the Windows BMR ISO image from the PowerProtect Data Manager UI. The image contains the necessary files to boot and create a WinPE system. The image includes a PowerProtect Data Manager Bare Metal Recovery Wizard that is launched and used as part of the restore.
Note: Ensure that the hardware on the target computer is operational and that the target computer is similar in make, model, and hardware configuration to the source computer to be recovered. For more details about the BMR requirements, see the PowerProtect Data Manager File System User Guide.
The target host boots with the custom WinPE image, either locally or over the network. The Welcome page of the PowerProtect Data Manager Bare Metal Recovery Wizard is displayed.
On the Select NIC page, you can select the network interface for communication with Data Manager during the BMR. If the required NIC driver is not in the list, click Load Driver to browse to it.
Note: The driver must not require a restart. The WinPE environment loads only in memory, and changes are not persistent across a restart. If a restart prompt appears, you might be able to ignore the prompt. Most NIC drivers are plug-and-play.
On the Host and Network Configuration page, enter the hostname of the target host and the domain name for the host.
On the Available Disks page, verify the disk configuration. The size and number of hard disks that are added to the target machine should be either equal to or greater than the size and number of disks on the source machine.
On the Select Server page, enter the PowerProtect Data Manager server and source hostname details. In the Server Name or IP field, add the IP of the server or FQDN only.
On the Select Backup page, select the respective host from the Source Host Name list and BMR data to restore to the destination host. Backups appear in the list in descending order from the most to least recent.
The Critical Volumes page displays the volumes that will be restored and the option to enable a quick disk format.
The PowerProtect Data Manager BMR wizard fetches information to perform a BMR, and the Summary page is displayed. To add custom BMR options, next to Custom restore options, click Options.
Confirm the quick format of disks and restore the backup.
The Status page shows the restore progress.
You can also monitor the Bare Metal Recovery job status in the PowerProtect Data Manager UI at Jobs > Protection Jobs.
The BMR wizard displays the results. After the recovery is successful, you can reboot the system and restore the application data as required.
With this easy BMR solution with PowerProtect Data Manager, Dell Technologies empowers Windows administrators to recover their business-critical Windows servers quickly and resume their operations.
For more details about disaster recovery for Windows with PowerProtect Data Manager, see the technical white paper and PowerProtect Data Manager: File System User Guide.
For more details about data protection with PowerProtect Data Manager, see the PowerProtect Data Manager website.
Author: Vinod Kumar Kumaresan, Principal Engineering Technologist, Data Protection Division