First off I want to state that this is not a supported EMC “product” or setup. This was done with an idea from David Payne at an Avamar User Group and a solution I came up with. I don’t know how well it scales, but thought it was a pretty cool idea/concept.

Ok with that being said the whole idea of this post is to show you how you can setup web based access to Avamar’s backups. The objectives I was trying to achieve are:

·         Provide file level access to Avamar Backups

·         Do not open AvFS/Samba access to all workstations/subnets (basically have a proxy)

·         Provide an “easy to use” web based interface

·         Provide search capabilities

·       Provide RBAC via Active Directory

·         Low to no cost

With this solution I have been able to accomplish all of these except the search capabilities (it works, but on a very limited basis so I consider it non-existent and even remove it from the web interface). Let’s get on with it.

Click here to watch the video!

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This is a simple one liner that can be used to rename the default Avamar SQL Restored BAK from f-0 for multiple databases.

The Problem:

When restoring a database to a BAK file from Avamar it automatically restores the file into a folder named the Database and a file called “f-0”. That isn’t very helpful, especially if you have multiple databases you have restored. So I wrote a one line powershell script that you can use to rename every BAK file to the name of the database.

Get-ChildItemC:\RestoredDBs\ | foreach {Rename-Item-Path“C:\RestoredDBs\$_\f-0”-NewName“$_.bak”}

Script Steps:

1.       Make sure and change the directory where your restored BAK files/folders are located.

2.       The script just gets a list of all the directories in the folder and then performs a rename on the file inside called “f-0” to the foldername.bak.

3.       E.g., I have a database that I restored located at C:\ResotredDBs\DB1. Inside of this folder you have a file called “f-0”. This script will rename the “f-0” file to DB1.bak.

Hopefully you find this useful.

~Lane

Avamar is a great product, I love the backup technology, however, it is lacking in a few areas when it comes to data mining/reporting. I’m assuming DPA makes up for this lack of information gathering, but currently I do not have that luxury. I’ve had to come up with a different way to extract the required data from our Avamar environment. I do this using all the resources available from an Avamar perspective.

The issue I have tackled in this blog post is extracting data from SQL Agent Backups that have “Completed with Exceptions” (status_code 30005). In our environment our DBA’s take databases offline constantly, causing our backups to “Complete with Exceptions”. The problem is Avamar does not have a way to report on the client logs…meaning I had no way to see which databases were offline unless I opened each client log (remotely or via the Avamar GUI) and search through it for the word “offline”. Well not anymore, I wrote the following PowerShell script to automate this process. You can download it by clicking here.

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Ever needed to deploy multiple EMC Avamar clients without having a deployment management software like SCCM? Well I had this scenario happen last week during my installation of our new EMC Avamar Grids. Looking around I found very little on this subject, so once again I decided to figure out a solution myself.

The approach is very straight forward and quite rudimentary but it got the job done. Below are the steps I used and the way I performed the install. However, this can be adapted to your use case quite easily, and the PowerShell script could be expanded to include Active Directory queries for a server list and then run the install on each host.

The Setup:

1.       Download PSExec from Sysinternals, and put it somewhere that is your path so it can be called from command window.

2.       Download all the different Avamar clients you need put them in a directory called C:\Avamar (on the box you will run the script from). The ones I use are:

·         Windows 32-bit (32bit.msi)

·         Windows 32-bit/System State Install (SystemState.msi)

·         Windows 64-bit (64bit.msi)

·         Windows 32-bit SQL (32bit-sql.msi)

·         Windows 64-bit SQL (64bit-sql.msi)

·         Windows 32-bit Exchange 2003 (exchange2k3.msi)

·         Windows 64-bit Exchange 2007/2010 (exchange2k7-2k10.msi)

You can name the files whatever you want, just make sure that they are set correctly in the PowerShell Script.

3.       Go find the avregister.bat file located in the C:\Program Files\avs\bin directory and copy it to the C:\Avamar directory.

a.       Edit the lines that reference “avagent” and change it to include the full path: “C:\Program Files\avs\bin\avagent.exe”

b.      This is because when psexec.exe runs it needs absolute file paths.

4.       Download the script and put it in your C:\Avamar directory, edit the script and change the $avamarUtilityNode variable to match your Avamar Utility Node hostname. You can download the script by click here.

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