Subclients

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Overview

• Default Subclients
• User-Defined Subclients
• Creating and Configuring Subclients
• Establishing Parallel Data Protection Operations Using Subclients
• Deleting Subclients

Subclient Operations

Operation Window

Audit Trail

Subclients and Data Encryption

Overview of SRM subclients

• Best Practices
• Important Considerations
• Subclient Path

Agent-Specific Subclient Operations

Overview

A subclient is a portion of a client, and it can either contain all of the client's data or a designated subset thereof. There are two main types of subclients, default and user-defined, which are described below. In addition, this section discusses general subclient configuration requirements as well as how to use multiple subclients to perform data protection operations in parallel.

Default Subclients

When the agent software is installed, depending on your agent, the install program automatically creates a Default Subclient for that agent. At that time, the Default Subclient comprises all fixed disk resources on the agent. (CD-ROM drives and mapped network drives are excluded by default.)

The Default Subclient contains all the data backed up/archived by an agent that is not allocated to other subclients (where applicable). This means that, with a minimum of configuration, you can run data protection operations that include all the data that you want to secure. However, this definition may change depending on your agent as additional subclients are defined. Although you can re-configure the content of Default Subclients to back up or archive specific objects, we strongly recommend against it because this would disable the capability of the Default Subclient to serve as a "catch-all" entity for client data, thus increasing the likelihood that some data will not get backed up or scanned for archiving.

On Demand Backup Sets/Archive Sets contain a Default Subclient that functions differently from ordinary Default Subclients. For more information, see Default Subclients for On Demand Backup Sets/Archive Sets.

User-Defined Subclients

For most agents, you can create additional subclients, called user-defined subclients, where each such subclient contains a unique portion of the client data. The user must create and define subclient contents for clients that do not automatically create a Default Subclient. In this case, only the data specified by the user is protected, migrated or archived. For agents that have Default Subclients, user-defined subclients are optional and need not be defined provided the Default Subclient implementation satisfies your data protection / data recovery requirements.

For the Windows File System system state, the default subclient, by default, is used for backup. However, you can optionally choose to use another subclient for system state backup. For more information, refer Configuring System State Backups.

See Also:

• Proxy Stub Subclient

Creating and Configuring Subclients

When you create a subclient, you need to configure the following information:

• Provide a subclient name.
• Define the content/databases of the subclient.
• Associate a storage policy/QR Policy to the subclient. If necessary, you can create a new storage policy directly from the Subclient Properties (Storage Device) dialog box and associate it to the selected subclient. 
• In addition to the above, some agents have additional configuration requirements.

You enter this information using the Subclient Properties dialog box. Although this information alone is sufficient to declare a subclient, you can optionally establish other subclient properties as well.

Due to the variation among agents on the specifics regarding subclient creation and configuration, click on the desired link at the top of this page for a more detailed discussion on your agent.

Establishing Parallel Data Protection Operations Using Subclients

Subclients fulfill two general purposes. They allow you to:

• Perform data protection or archiving on different parts of the client at different times.
• Perform data protection or archiving on multiple parts of the client in parallel.

You can perform a data protection operation on an entire backup set/archive set/instance/agent quicker by scheduling multiple subclients simultaneously. This way, the data protection jobs proceed in parallel and take less time than if the backup set/archive set/instance/agent was not organized into separate subclients.

In order for the data protection jobs for most agents to run in parallel, the backup set/archive set/instance/agent must be configured to use either different storage policies or a storage policy that is configured to have at least one data stream for each subclient. If the subclients are configured to use the same storage policy, and if that storage policy is not configured for multiple data streams, then a media group resource contention will arise and the competing subclients will perform the data protection operations one after the other in a serial manner.

See Storage Policies and Data Streams and Hardware-Specific Resource Issues for the respective overview.

Deleting Subclients

The system does not allow you to delete a subclient if it is currently running a data protection or archive operation. Any attempt to delete a subclient under such a condition causes the deletion to fail. If a data protection or archive operation is in progress, do one of the following:

• Wait for the operation to complete.
• Kill the job using the Job Manager.

Once the data protection or archive operation is no longer in progress, you can delete the subclient.

When you delete a subclient, these actions occur:

• The content of the deleted subclient will be absorbed by another subclient or the default subclient.
• If the default subclient includes content other than \ or /, explicitly add the content of the deleted subclient to the default subclient's content if you want to continue backing up the deleted subclient's content in the default subclient.
• If content of the deleted subclient includes an NFS-mounted file system, you must explicitly include it in another subclient if you want to continue backing it up. See Configuring Backups for NFS-Mounted File Systems for more information.
• The data of the deleted subclient, prior to the deletion of the subclient, is still available for recovery with browse in time operations.
• All job schedules and job histories that pertain to the deleted subclient are deleted.

• When a user changes the storage policy association of a subclient, a subclient is deleted, or a client or an agent is deleted, only the retention days must be exceeded for data to be aged. In these cases, retention cycles are set to zero (0). However, when a client or an agent is deconfigured, the associated data will be aged according to the associated storage policy copy’s defined retention time and cycle rules. In this case, retention cycles are honored. If necessary, you can enable the Ignore Cycles Retention on De-Configured Clients option from the control panel’s Media Management Configuration (Service Configuration) dialog box so that the defined retention cycle rules are ignored for the data associated with deconfigured clients.

Subclient Operations

You can perform subclient operations as long as the agent is installed or the pseudo-client is created, any dependent nodes (such as backup sets/databases/instances/partitions) are created/configured, and the subclient appears enabled in the CommCell Browser. Subclient operations include the running of data protection and archive operations, viewing job history, viewing job schedules, as well as configuring subclient properties and deleting a user-defined subclient.

Operation Window

You can configure operation rules at this level using the Operation Window. See Operation Window for an overview.

Audit Trail

Operations performed with this feature are recorded in the Audit Trail. See Audit Trail for more information.

Subclients and Data Encryption

Data is encrypted according to the method you select while you Configure the Client for Data Encryption. You can select from several algorithms and key lengths. For more information, see Data Encryption.

Overview of SRM Subclients

A Subclient is a logical entity that uniquely defines a unit of data on a client. Subclients serve two primary roles:

• As the basis of Data Collection jobs
• As the basic unit of data for cost analysis

During installation of the SRM Agents for File System, SharePoint, Network Attached Storage or Exchange, a Default Subclient is automatically created by the system that contains all of the client's data. Data Collection jobs can then be scheduled for the Subclient. In addition, administrators can distribute the contents of the client by creating one or more User-Defined Subclients. When a User-Defined Subclient is created, the system automatically excludes that portion of the client content from the Default Subclient in order to avoid overlapping content among Subclients residing on the same client.

Distributing the client content among multiple Subclients provides the following distinct advantages:

• Data Collection jobs can be run on different portions of the client data at different times for load-balancing and performance reasons.
• Subclients provide the flexibility of assigning different Billable Entities to each portion of the client's data for Cost Analysis purposes.
• Subclient level reports are available for the SRM Agents for File System, Network Attached Storage and Exchange that provide more granular statistical reporting on client data. See Available Reports for more information.

Best Practices

The usefulness of Subclients in fine-tuning Data Collection and cost analysis operations is illustrated by the example scenarios below:

• An Information Technology department and an Accounting department of a company use the same client, Client1. The data from the Information Technology department resides on storage resource A, which costs $.10 per MB of storage. The information from the Accounting department resides on storage resource B, which costs $.15 per MB of storage. When Client1 was registered with the SRM domain, a Default Subclient was created by the system. A user-defined subclient, subclient_accounting, was later defined to represent the data of the Accounting Department, whose data resided on storage resource B.

  A billable entity, information_technology, was created and assigned to the Default Subclient. Billable entity Accounting was created and assigned to subclient_accounting. Data collection was run on Client1, resulting in a total of 100 MB of data collected for the Default Subclient, and 50 MB of data was collected for subclient_accounting. After running Cost Analysis Reports, the system was able to determine that it costs $10 (100 MB x $.10 per MB) to store the data of the Information Technology department, and $5 (50 MB x $.05 per MB) to store the data of the Accounting department. This technique illustrates how subclients can be used to organize a client's data into manageable entities for cost analysis purposes.

• Client2 has storage resources E, F, and G. The SRM administrator wants to improve Data Collection Analysis performance on the client based on the needs of the organization. Because storage resource E is used frequently, F is used moderately, and G is rarely used, the administrator would like to schedule Data Collection Analysis on E to run nightly, F to run weekly, and G to not run any Data Collection at all. To accomplish this, the administrator sets up a User-Defined Subclient whose content is F and another User-Defined Subclient whose content is G. Storage resource E remains in the content of the Default Subclient. This configuration would allow the administrator to assign the "Nightly" Schedule Policy to the Default Subclient containing E, and assign the "Weekly" Schedule Policy to the User-Defined Subclient containing F, and disable Data Collection jobs from running on the User-Defined Subclient containing G. This technique resulted in enhanced Data Collection Analysis performance by adjusting the frequency of job schedules on portions of the client's data based on use, and by not gathering detailed statistics on the undesired portion.

Important Considerations

Consider the following when creating and configuring subclients:

• After adding, editing or removing a subclient, you must run an Analysis level data collection job on all subclients associated with an agent for reports to reflect the changes.
• Regular expressions (or wildcards) are not supported for subclient content include paths.
• Subclient content for the SRM SharePoint Agent is defined at the Site Collection Level and can consist of Top Level Sites as well as Subsites.
• Exclusion and exception filters are not applicable for the SRM SharePoint Agent and the SRM Exchange Agent.
• Exception filters are not applicable for the SRM NAS Agent.

Subclient Path

The following section describes NAS specific use of network interface in subclient path:

• Subclient path may have up to three parts: Network Protocol (CIFS:// or NFS://), Network Interface and Directory.
• Directory part can be omitted in subclient path with network interface part. Such path is called interface path and is made of all (CIFS or NFS) paths of that interface. Path with directory part is called directory path.
• Network interface part is optional in directory path of NetApp filer: it is not required (e.g. CIFS://vol0/test or NFS:///vol/vol0/home) when no vFiler is configured, or only default vFiler exists; it is required to be set to vFiler interface for storage path path of vFiler (e.g. CIFS://{ratrod2.pslab.company.com}/vol/vol1/data2 or NFS://{ratrod2.pslab.commvault.com}/vol/vol1/data2)
• Network interface part is required in directory path of EMC Celerra: it is set to CIFS server interface for CIFS path (e.g. CIFS://{celerra_dm2.galaxylab.commvault.com}/1TB) and to Data Mover interface for NFS path (e.g. NFS://{celerra_dm2.commvault.com}/1TB)

Agent-Specific Subclient Operations

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