Splitting CommCells

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Overview

Preparing to Split the CommCell

Preparing a Computer to be a Child of a CommCell

Change the CommCell ID of a Child CommCell(s)

Post CommCell Split Tasks

Post CommCell Split Considerations

Overview

Splitting CommCells allows you to split a CommCell into smaller CommCells. This feature is most useful if your CommCell has gotten so large that there is a negative affect on the performance of your operations. Splitting a CommCell involves creating child CommCell(s), by installing the CommServe software and then migrating the necessary clients and MediaAgents over to the child CommCell(s).

License Requirement

This feature requires a Feature License to be available in the CommServe^® Server.

Review general license requirements included in License Administration. Also, View All Licenses provides step-by-step instructions on how to view the license information.

Preparing to Split the CommCell

To prepare a CommCell for splitting:

1. Prepare a list of all of the clients, libraries, MediaAgents, and storage policies that are part of the CommCell that are being split.

   Note that some Agents and data residing in some Storage Resources cannot be migrated to a new CommCell. (See CommCell Migration - Support for more information.) Consider retaining these entities in the original CommCell.

2. Determine which of these CommCell entities are to be migrated to the child CommCell(s), and prepare a list of sub-groupings per CommCell. If there are going to be more than one child CommCell, determine which CommCell entity is going to which child CommCell.
3. Make sure the clients of one sub-grouping are not using the same storage policies or MediaAgents from other sub-groups. If necessary, change the storage policies of the appropriate subclients.
4. Contact your software provider to obtain a new CommCell ID number as well as a new CSID license file for each new CommCell. The new license must have at least the same or a larger number of licenses for each CommCell entity.
5. Install the latest Service Pack on the parent CommServe.

Preparing a Computer to be a Child of a CommCell

To prepare a computer to be a child of a parent CommCell:

1. Install the CommServe software with an evaluation license on each computer that is to be a child CommCell. Do not install any other platforms on these computers.
2. Make sure that the child CommCells have the same updates as the parent CommCell.
3. Run a Disaster Recovery backup of the parent CommCell. See Starting a Disaster Recovery Backup.
4. Run the CommServe Disaster Recovery Tool on each child CommCell to restore the database of the parent CommCell. See CommServe Recovery for more information.
5. Disable the clients, libraries, and MediaAgents that are to be migrated to the child CommCell(s).

Change the CommCell ID of a Child CommCell

Perform the following steps in each of the child CommCells:

1. Contact your software provider to obtain a new license for the child CommCells.
2. From the Resource Pack, copy the CommCell Clone utility, commcellclone.exe, and the new license file to the <software installation path>\Base folder on the CommServe computers for the child CommCells. (See Tools and Utilities for more information on the Resource Pack.)
3. From each of these CommServe computers, run the utility using the new license file that was received from your software provider as a command line argument, as follows:

   CommCellClone [-vm <virtualMachine>] [-license <License File>] [-rt <Reuse Media Y/N>]

   For example:

   CommCellClone -License ChildCommcellLicense.xml

Post CommCell Split Tasks

The following steps need to be performed on each child CommCell:

1. Change the name of each child CommCell using the CommServe Disaster Recovery Tool.
2. Apply a new CSID license file on each child CommCell. See Activate Licenses.
3. If the child CommCell is across a firewall, make sure that the CommCell entities that are to be part of the child CommCell are configured for firewall.
4. Start services on the child CommCell. See Start Services on Windows.
5. Start the CommCell Console on each child CommCell.
6. For each client of the child CommCell, change the name of the CommServe to the child CommServe name from the General tab of the Client Computer properties dialog box.
7. Disable the clients, libraries, and MediaAgents in the child CommCell that are to remain in the parent CommCell(s).
8. If the clients, storage policies, and MediaAgents belonging to other sub-groupings are no longer needed in the parent or child CommCell, these can be deconfigured from the appropriate CommCell Console.
9. Optionally, you can Install other CommCell entities on the new CommServe, such as clients, MediaAgents, and/or agents on each child CommCell.
10. Run full data protection operations on each CommCell.
11. Restart the client services if the client fails to browse and restore on the child CommCell after the CommCell Split.

Post CommCell Split Considerations

Consider the following after splitting a CommCell:

Splitting CommCells when a MediaAgent Computer is not Being Split with Associated Clients

• To obtain a list of all media and/or mount paths, run the Media Information Report for all storage policy copies that have data for the client you wish to migrate from the parent CommCell.
• The media associated with migrated clients are not automatically exported after the migration. Hence, you must manually export the media from the library of the parent CommCell, and then manually input the media into the library of the child CommCell. Ensure that compatible libraries and drives are available in the child CommCell to restore the migrated data.
• Similarly, in the case of magnetic libraries, configure a magnetic library on the child CommCell computer with empty mount paths. Then, copy the CV_MAGNETIC folders available in the mount paths of the magnetic libraries associated with the migrated clients from the parent CommCell computer to the child CommCell computer. (The CV_MAGNETIC folder is used by the software to store the data associated with magnetic libraries.)

Issues With Data in Child CommCells

• When an Auxiliary Copy operation is performed on the parent CommCell after successfully splitting a CommCell, the Auxiliary Copy operation only copies the data associated with the Data Protection operations from the parent CommCell. The data will not be copied by the Auxiliary Copy operation, even if the job status is displayed as To be Copied or Partial.
• Similarly, a Data Verification operation will only verify the Data Protection operations performed in the child CommCell.

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