As I’ve mentioned in the past, there’s a few different licensing models for NetWorker, but capacity licensing (e.g., 100 TB front end backup size) gives considerable flexibility, effectively enabling all product functionality within a single license, thereby allowing NetWorker usage to adapt to suit the changing needs of the business.
In the past, measuring utilisation has typically required either the use of DPA or asking your DellEMC account team to review the environment and provide a report. NetWorker 9.2 however gives you a new, self-managed option – the ability to run, whenever you want, a capacity measurement report to determine what your utilisation ratio is.
This is done through a new command line tool, nsrcapinfo, which is incredibly simple to run. In fact, running it without any options at all will give the default 60 day report, providing utilisation details for each of the key data types as well as summary. For instance, against my lab server, here’s the output:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF8" standalone="yes" ?> <!-- ~ Copyright (c) 2017 Dell EMC Corporation. All Rights Reserved. ~ ~ This software contains the intellectual property of Dell EMC Corporation or is licensed to ~ Dell EMC Corporation from third parties. Use of this software and the intellectual property ~ contained therein is expressly limited to the terms and conditions of the License ~ Agreement under which it is provided by or on behalf of Dell EMC. --> <Capacity_Estimate_Report> <Time_Stamp>2017-08-02T21:21:18Z</Time_Stamp> <Clients>13</Clients> <DB2>0.0000</DB2> <Informix>0.0000</Informix> <IQ>0.0000</IQ> <Lotus>0.0000</Lotus> <MySQL>0.0000</MySQL> <Sybase>0.0000</Sybase> <Oracle>0.0000</Oracle> <SAP_HANA>0.0000</SAP_HANA> <SAP_Oracle>0.0000</SAP_Oracle> <Exchange_NMM8.x>0.0000</Exchange_NMM8.x> <Exchange_NMM9.x>0.0000</Exchange_NMM9.x> <Hyper-V>0.0000</Hyper-V> <SharePoint>0.0000</SharePoint> <SQL_VDI>0.0000</SQL_VDI> <SQL_VSS>0.0000</SQL_VSS> <Meditech>0.0000</Meditech> <Other_Applications>2678.0691</Other_Applications> <Unix_Filesystems>599.9214</Unix_Filesystems> <VMware_Filesystems>360.3535</VMware_Filesystems> <Windows_Filesystems>27.8482</Windows_Filesystems> <Total_Largest_Filesystem_Fulls>988.1231</Total_Largest_Filesystem_Fulls> <Peak_Daily_Applications>2678.0691</Peak_Daily_Applications> <Capacity_Estimate>3666.1921</Capacity_Estimate> <Unit_of_Measure_Bytes_per_GiB>1073741824</Unit_of_Measure_Bytes_per_GiB> <Days_Measured>60</Days_Measured> </Capacity_Estimate_Report>
That’s in XML by default – and the numbers are in GiB.
If you do fulls on longer cycles than the default of a 60 day measurement window you can extend the data sampling range by using -d nDays in the command (e.g., “nsrcapinfo -d 90” would provide a measurement over a 90 day window). You can also, if you wish for further analysis, generate additional reports (see the command reference guide or, man nsrcapinfo if you’re on Linux for the full details). One of those reports that I think will be quite popular with backup administrators will be the client report. An example of that is below:
[root@orilla ~]# nsrcapinfo -r clients "Hostname", "Client_Capacity_GiB", "Application_Names" "abydos.turbamentis.int", "2.3518", "Unix_Filesystems" "vulcan", "16.0158", "VMware_Filesystems" "win01", "80.0785", "VMware_Filesystems" "picon", "40.0394", "VMware_Filesystems" "win02", "80.0788", "VMware_Filesystems" "vega", "64.0625", "VMware_Filesystems" "test02", "16.0157", "VMware_Filesystems" "test03", "16.0157", "VMware_Filesystems" "test01", "16.0157", "VMware_Filesystems" "krell", "32.0314", "VMware_Filesystems" "faraway.turbamentis.int", "27.8482", "Windows_Filesystems" "orilla.turbamentis.int", "1119.5321", "Other_Applications Unix_Filesystems" "rama.turbamentis.int", "2156.1067", "Other_Applications Unix_Filesystems"
That’s a straight-up simple view of the FETB estimation for each client you’re protecting in your environment.
There you have it – capacity measurement in NetWorker as a native function in version 9.2.