Testing Failover of Partitioned Deduplication Database

You can test the partitioned deduplication database (DDB) failover.

Test a failover for the following reasons:

• To ensure that the backup jobs continue to run against active partitions when one of the DDB partition goes offline.

• To test restores from previous backups.

The process flow for testing the partitioned DDB involves the following tasks in the order listed:

1. Create a global deduplication policy with partitioned DDB configuration (that is, with two DDB partitions, each partition on different MediaAgents).

   For instructions, see Creating a Global Deduplication Policy.

2. Create a disk library.

   Important:

   • For Network-attached storage (NAS) or Clustered File System based mount paths, backups and restores can continue by using other active partitions without any user intervention after failover.

   • For direct-attached storage or SAN-based mount paths, backups will continue. However, to restore data from previous backups, either bring the partition online or migrate the disk library and attach it to another online partition.

3. To load-balance the resources available in all the data paths, set round robin as part of the GridStor configuration.

   For instructions, see Round Robin between Data Paths.

4. Create a storage policy that points to a global deduplication policy created in step 1.

   For instructions, see Creating a Storage Policy with Global Deduplication.

5. Associate subclients with the storage policy configured in step 4.

   For more information on how to associate subclients to storage policy, see the documentation for the specific agent.

6. On the global deduplication policy, verify that the Allow jobs to run to this copy while at least n partition(s) are available option is enabled.

   For instructions, see Modifying Deduplication Database Recovery Settings.

7. Run client backups.

   For more information on how to run backups, see the documentation for the specific agent.

8. Shut down the services on one of the partitioned MediaAgent.

   For instructions, see Restarting the Deduplication Database MediaAgent.

   The backups should continue to the other active partition.

9. Test restores on the clients from the previous backup.

   For more information on how to run a restore operation, see the documentation for the specific agent.

10. Start the services on the MediaAgent.

    For instructions, see Starting a Service.

    The new backups should automatically start using that MediaAgent.