www.commvault.com 

My rating:

This review is reprinted from my new book Administering Exchange Server 2000 from McGraw-Hill

Description

CommVault Galaxy is a suite of powerful storage management tools for backing up, managing, and restoring data across an enterprise. It consists of three sets of components:

• CommServer Storage Manager, which coordinates storage management.

• MediaAgents, which transfer data to backup media libraries.

• IDataAgents or Intelligent Data Agents, client software that enable host computer systems to have their data backed up.

I was particularly interested in the iDataAgent for Exchange, which lets you perform an online restore of the Exchange information store down to the level of granularity of a single message with all its Outlook properties, date/time stamp, message ID, attachments, and other settings intact. You can also recover individual mailboxes or just a single folder or subfolder within a mailbox. You can also implement storage policies with Galaxy for implementing data management strategies across your enterprise. And you can perform these administrative tasks using either an MMC console or remotely using browser-based tools.

Product Review

This product has one of the best collections of manuals I’ve seen in a while. There are well-written Quick Start Guides that walk you step by step through the installation process, and Administration guides covering the different iDataAgents that are used to backup, manage, and restore the Windows 2000 File System, Exchange 2000 information store, and so on.

Installation of Galaxy proceeds in several stages. First make sure that DNS is configured properly for your network as this is used by Galaxy for name resolution (although Hosts files can be used in a small environment). Configure your tape library ahead of time as well.

The first Galaxy component you install is the CommServe software, preferably on a clean Windows 2000 server with 2 GB free disk space since SQL Server 7.0 is installed in the process. Installation took some time and several reboots were required. After the installation you have a storage framework created called a Galaxy CommCell, which when completed will consist of CommServe Storage Manager, one or more MediaAgents managing storage libraries, and one or more iDataAgents including at the minimum the Windows File System agent for backing up Windows 2000 file systems and possibly other agents like the Exchange agent for backing up your Exchange server data.

The second step in the procedure is to install the MediaAgent software on the server that has the connected tape library or other removable media library. Installation is straightforward and supports a variety of media devices. Make sure the CommServe server is running when you install MediaAgent on your media server.

Once this is complete, you then install the default client software, the iDataAgent for Windows File System, on the servers on which you plan to back up data. This is a prerequisite for installing other agents like the Exchange agent since Exchange makes use of the Windows 2000 file system APIs for data storage.

At this stage you now having a working CommCell and should be able to back up file systems on the servers running the iDataAgents (iDAs). You can do this by logging on to the CommServe machine and opening the Galaxy CommCell MMC console from the Galaxy programs group in the Start menu (Figure A2-3). Use this console to create and schedule backup jobs, perform restores, generate reports, manage media and security, create storage policies, and so on. Note that you log on to the CommCell using the cvadmin account created during installation (the password for this account is also “cvadmin”)¾you cannot log on to the console using Windows 2000 accounts, even the Administrator account.

Figure A2-3: The Galaxy CommCell Snap-in for MMC

To back up your Exchange information stores you need to install the iDataAgent for Exchange on your Exchange servers (there are different versions of this iDA for Exchange 5.5 and Exchange 2000 so get the right one). The iDataAgent for Windows File System should first be installed on these machines as mentioned above, but it can optionally be installed together with the iDA for Exchange. Before you install the iDA for Exchange you need to create a Galaxy Administrator mailbox-enabled user using Active Directory Users and Computers and allow enough time for Active Directory to replicate this information to other domain controllers. Make sure this account has a non-null password¾I found that I couldn’t install the Exchange agent afterwards until I changed the password to something non-null. The Client Quick Start Guide for Microsoft Exchange 2000 Server outlines all the steps clearly. Then you log on to your Exchange server as an administrator and install the iDA for Exchange Mailbox, after which you install the iDA for Exchange Database. Make sure you reboot your Exchange server after installing the iDA even though you aren’t prompted to do this.

The CommServe Console will now include the additional functionality of being able to back up Exchange 2000 mailboxes and databases. Figure A2-4 shows the view in the Java version of the CommCell administrator tool, which is started through Internet Explorer. Note that the CommServe Java Runtime Environment must be installed on the remote machine you are running IE on.

Figure A2-4: The Galaxy CommCell Console for Java GUI