Netware 6.5 and EMC Avamar Installation and deployment

We had some rough patches but managed to plow through it and now have the Avamar solution working at 28 sights with in our school districit.

A little about our enviroment, we have 27 remote sites all conected back to our central office via a varing Metro Ethernet links between 10 Mbps to private fiber running at 1,000 Mbps. Each remote location has a Dell Power 2950 servers with 8 GB of RAM. Each server runs native Netware 6.5 SP7, Groupwise 7, Zenworks 7, Print services for the building, Vexira AV, and a library catalog system.

The Avamar unit we initally recieved shiped with the Netware AVAgent version 4.1.0.1470, we had a lot of problems with this client build abending my netware servers by eating up the memmory buffers. We tried hard setting the Pcache and Fcache in the backup job but this did not realy help.

Some of the errors we encountered where as follows

2-10-2009 8:24:33 pm: SERVER-5.70-0 [nmID=2000A]
Short term memory allocator is out of memory.
1 attempts to get more memory failed.
request size in bytes 160 from Module SERVER.NLM


2-10-2009 8:59:59 pm: SERVER-5.70-0 [nmID=6001D]
Cache memory allocator out of available memory.

We then when to a prior version some of the other customers where using 4.0.3-24 this version worked for a few days but would abend my servers as well.

EMC came out with an updated build 4.1.105-68 this build required a modification preformed by EMC support staff on our Avamar Utility nodes. Bellow are the steps I had to preform on our Netware servers to make the client functional.

1.) Delete all traces on your server of any prior Avamar client

2.) Remark out any services beyond those required to get your netware server up and running.

3.) Restart the server

4.) In SYS:\AVAMAR create a VAR directory and create a file avagent.cmd

5.) Edit avagent.cmd and place --sharedheapsize=500 in the file. This sets Avamar to run in a reserved memory space of 500 MB

6.) Launch the installation of the Avamar client as per normal instructions

7.) Edit the autoexec.ncf and make certain the Avamar client is loading before any non OS related services, also re-enable the rest of your services remarked out in step 2.

8.) Load the rest of your services make certain everything is running

9.) Restart the server to make certain everything loaded correctly. You may need to play with the placement in the load order.

I have had working backups for the past 4 months with this client and load sequence.

Some files of note

**************************************************************************

Autoexec.ncf

**************************************************************************

SET LEVEL 2 OPLOCKS ENABLED = OFF

SET CLIENT FILE CACHING ENABLED = OFF

SET Daylight Savings Time Offset = 1:00:00

SET Start Of Daylight Savings Time = (MARCH SUNDAY SECOND 2:00:00 AM)

SET End Of Daylight Savings Time = (NOVEMBER SUNDAY FIRST 2:00:00 AM)

SET Time Zone = EST5EDT

# Note: The Time zone information mentioned above

# should always precede the SERVER name.

SEARCH ADD SYS:/system

SEARCH ADD SYS:/JAVA/BIN

SEARCH ADD SYS:/JAVA/NWGFX/BIN

SEARCH ADD SYS:/JAVA/NJCLV2/BIN

SEARCH ADD SYS:/NI/UPDATE/BIN

SEARCH ADD sys:/usr/sbin

SEARCH ADD sys:/usr/bin

SEARCH ADD SYS:/APACHE2

SEARCH ADD SYS:/tomcat/4/bin

SEARCH ADD SYS:/tomcat/5.0/bin

SEARCH ADD SYS:/JAVA/NWGFX

search add sys:/public/vexira

SEARCH ADD SYS:/VEXIRA

SEARCH ADD SYS:/SYSTEM/NMA

SEARCH ADD SYS:/BIN

FILE SERVER NAME South

load conlog MAXIMUM=100

sys:/etc/initsys.ncf

load monitor

dhcpsrvr

LOAD SCMD

mount all

IPMINIT.NCF

load nile.nlm

load httpstk.nlm /SSL /keyfile:"SSL CertificateIP"

LOAD PORTAL.NLM

LOAD NDSIMON.NLM

LOAD NICISDI.XLM

LOAD SASDFM.XLM

NMA5.NCF

BSTART.NCF

UNIXENV.NCF

LOAD PKI.NLM

LOAD NLDAP.NLM

PSA

SCRIPT.NCF

AP2WEBUP

ADMSRVUP

tcadmup.ncf

tomcat4.ncf

tomcat5.ncf

RCONAG6

SMSSTART.NCF

LOAD EMBOX.NLM

openwbem.ncf

# Added by Avamar Client Install

SYS:\AVAMAR\BIN\AVCTL.NLM start

grpwise

spectrum.ncf

zfdstart.ncf

printers.ncf

scrsaver

vaguard

vaupdate

cron.nlm

sys:\system\gwsrch.ncf

**************************************************************************

SMSSTART.NCF

**************************************************************************

LOAD SMSUT.NLM

LOAD SMDR.NLM

LOAD TSAFS.NLM

LOAD TSANDS.NLM