{"id":7250,"date":"2018-12-04T19:11:48","date_gmt":"2018-12-04T09:11:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/?p=7250"},"modified":"2018-12-11T07:05:03","modified_gmt":"2018-12-10T21:05:03","slug":"data-protection-search-overview","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/2018\/12\/04\/data-protection-search-overview\/","title":{"rendered":"Data Protection Search Overview"},"content":{"rendered":"

First up, a quick explanation: I’ve not posted a lot of late because I’ve spent most of my time outside of work in November preparing for a special date. On 30 November, on our 22nd anniversary, my partner and I married \u2013 we were finally able to get rid of that tediously sterile word, partner<\/em> and start calling ourselves husbands<\/em>. With the special day behind us, it’s time to get back to some blogging!<\/p>\n

\"Searching\"<\/a><\/p>\n

I’ve been meaning to do this blog post for a while. In this post, I’m going to be covering off Data Protection Search<\/em>, a seriously useful helper for NetWorker and Avamar environments. You can get a lot of value out of Data Protection Search (henceforth: DP-Search) when you attach it to just a single NetWorker or Avamar server, but its extended value starts when you’re managing multiple environments.<\/p>\n

So, let’s start with the basics: what is it? As its name implies, it’s a search utility; but, calling it a search utility is as gross a simplification as calling Dell Technologies a “computer company”. This is powerful<\/em> search, ideal for help desk\/recovery operators, backup administrators, and even specialised groups, such as legal teams. In the simplest possible view, you might think of it as “Google for Backups”. And yes, that means it operates completely within a web interface.<\/p>\n

DP-Search is integrated into the licensing for Data Protection Suite for Backup<\/em>, Data Protection Suite for Enterprise<\/em>, and Data Protection Suite for Virtual Machines<\/em>. (If you’re using traditional NetWorker or Avamar licensing, or capacity based NetWorker licensing, contact your local Dell EMC team for help on that front.) You can find the support page here<\/a><\/strong>.<\/p>\n

DP-Search is based on an elastic scaling appliance engine \u2013 you deploy one or more virtual machines into your ESX environment. In a single node deployment, you only deploy the single host; for multi-node deployments, when deploying you just nominate a key search server. (In the back end, the appliances negotiate amongst themselves on who does what.)<\/p>\n

The other thing you need to know about DP-Search is that it’s trivial<\/em> to deploy and get running. How trivial? After I completed the download (accursed Australian ADSL made that the longest part in the entire process), it took me well less than an hour to deploy the virtual machine into my lab, hook it to my NetWorker server, and start running searches. (It would have taken less time except I deployed over WiFi, dragging the OVA between an intermediary laptop.) For my testing, I downloaded DP-Search 18.1<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

The DP-Search deployment guide has excellent information in it on how many appliances you should consider deploying, and what size disks you’ll need. After that, all you need is some appropriate IP addresses and DNS entries, and you’re off and running for deployment. In this case, I didn’t bother with screen-shots of the deployment process, but instead after deployment I booted the search appliance and waited the suggested 10 minutes or so before browsing to:<\/p>\n

https:\/\/searchAppliance\/admin<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

In this case, my search appliance was ‘jart.turbamentis.int’. The login page is a very standard one \u2013 if you’ve used the NetWorker HTML5 UI, the Avamar HTML5 UI or Data Protection Central, it will look quite similar:<\/p>\n

\"01<\/a>
01 DP Search Login<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Your default username is admin<\/strong>; the password for both the admin<\/em> and root<\/em> accounts is assigned by you<\/strong> as part of the OVA deployment.<\/p>\n

When you log on to a freshly initialised DP-Search appliance, you’ll get the initial welcome screen; in the screen-shot below, the only difference is I’ve clicked the hamburger menu in the top left-hand corner to show the options along the menu pane:<\/p>\n

\"02<\/a>
02 DP Search Initial View<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Now, in this example, running in my lab, I’m not worrying with LDAP servers. I wanted to push on fairly much straight away and get my lab NetWorker server added to the search environment. There are specific instructions for adding both NetWorker and Avamar servers to a DP-Search environment in the deployment\/administration guide for DP-Search. For NetWorker, you need to quickly run through the process of adding the DP-Search server as a NetWorker client (you don’t have to back it up \u2013 for a clustered DP-Search environment, you add each DP-Search server as a client), then set some remote access options. So, with a hostname of jart<\/em>, I used the NMC client creation wizard as follows:<\/p>\n

\"03<\/a>
03 NMC Add Client Wizard 1<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

First step of course per the above is to specify the client name, then click Next ><\/strong><\/em>.<\/p>\n

\"04<\/a>
04 NMC Add Client Wizard 2<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Here we detect the OS and NetWorker version as well as available backup types from the client. It’s fine to leave everything here as-is and click Next ><\/strong><\/em>.<\/p>\n

\"05<\/a>
05 NMC Add Client Wizard 3<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

You’ll get a notification about the client certificate at this point, click OK<\/strong> to continue.<\/p>\n

\"06<\/a>
06 NMC Add Client Wizard 4<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

You can pretty much walk through all of the client creation wizard steps, leaving all options as-is, so progressing along now:<\/p>\n

\"06<\/a>
06 NMC Add Client Wizard 5<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\"07<\/a>
07 NMC Add Client Wizard 6<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\"08<\/a>
08 NMC Add Client Wizard 7<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

There, that’s done! Now, the next step is that we want to create a clone of the Operators<\/em> user group within NMC for the NetWorker server, and add the root user for each DP-Search cluster node into the group:<\/p>\n

\"09<\/a>
09 NMC Copy Usergroup<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\"10<\/a>
10 NMC Configure Usergroup<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

So, you may be wondering why we’ve done the above. What we’re effectively doing is setting up a configuration within NetWorker that allows NetWorker to:<\/p>\n