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Summary

While attempting to restore a SnapVault server image from a Filer using ExpressDR DPX Bare Metal Recovery, you may encounter an Error Restoring ExpressDR Info from NearStore" error message. "

 

Symptoms

While attempting to restore a SnapVault server image from a Filer, you may encounter dialog boxes resembling those shown below.

 

 

 

Resolution

Generally, this issue occurs when ExpressDR DPX Bare Metal Recovery cannot access or download the metadata files necessary to reconstruct a server from the Filer. These essential files often contain information about the partition, boot area, and volume mappings of your source server.

ExpressDR DPX Bare Metal Recovery may have trouble accessing the metadata files for a number of different reasons. Some of the most common situations in which this issue may arise include:

  1. A SQL or Exchange server successfully backed up, but did not include the ExpressDR DPX Bare Metal Recovery object.
  2. A SQL or Exchange server successfully backed up, but the ExpressDR DPX Bare Metal Recovery backup portion failed.
  3. Backup Express is licensed for SQL/Exchange backup jobs and not ExpressDR, rendering the metadata for Bare Metal Recovery to be unavailable.
  4. The Filer is not utilizing a current or valid SnapVault OnTap Secondary License (NOTE: OnTap Primary and Secondary licenses are separate entities).
  5. The Filer's SnapVault options are not properly configured.
  6. Multiple parallel operations (such as SnapMirror) are running on your Filer, causing it to exceed resource or license limitations.
  7. The current ExpressDR DPX Bare Metal Recovery session is causing the Filer to exceed resource or license limitations.
  8. Manually cleaned or removed QTree data on the Filer is confusing ExpressDR DPX Bare Metal Recovery.
  9. Manually altered File, Directory, or Qtree permissions are preventing ExpressDR DPX Bare Metal Recovery from accessing files.
  10. Altered login permissions are preventing ExpressDR DPX Bare Metal Recovery from accessing necessary resources.
  11. The volume being accessed is the destination volume of a SnapMirror volume.
  12. The volume being accessed was restored from a full-volume smtape NDMP backup.

The situations described in numbers 1-3 are caused by backup issues. To resolve these issues you must ensure that the ExpressDR DPX Bare Metal Recovery object is being backed up as expected given the Backup Express license and the backup job definition.

You can check to see if the proper ExpressDR DPX Bare Metal Recovery data has been backed up by performing the following procedure.

  1. Open the Backup > NDMP window.
  2. Drill down into the destination Filer and check the destination volume of the backup.
  3. Find the Qtree containing the filename that matches the following pattern:

    [job-name]server-name@APPS_
  4. Find the _ExpressDR_1.0 folder.
  5. Expand this folder to show the brminfo.txt and volmap.txt files.

If you cannot find the _ExpressDR_1.0 folder or the necessary text files, then a problem likely occurred during the ExpressDR DPX Bare Metal Recovery backup. You may need to check Filer permissions.

The situations described in numbers 4-7 are caused by your Filer's licensing or resource limitations. Check your Filer's system logs for connection trouble, coordinate with the Filer administrator to free up resources, or contact your Network Appliance support representative for help with troubleshooting or increasing the Filer's resources. Proper licensing can usually be verified either with the FilerView window's Filer > Manage Licenses function, or through the command line's license command. If the Filer is properly licensed, open an OnTap command prompt, either via telnet or via the OnTap FilerView GUI, and enter the following command:

options snapvault

Display the necessary options as follows:

snapvault.enable on
snapvault.access all

The situations described in numbers 8-10 can occur when Filer administrators attempt to manually clean up or tweak Volume data created by Backup Express. Manually changing this data in any way can affect backup and restore operations. We suggest that Backup Express be given exclusive control over server destination volumes so that backup, catalog condense, and restore operations can take place as expected.

For Number 8, we suggest that ExpressDR DPX Bare Metal Recovery be given a login ID that has full access to your Filer. Full access is necessary for ExpressDR DPX Bare Metal Recovery to search for available snapshots and access data for recovery. The login ID generally used for restore operations is the root password for the Filer.

Conditions 11 and 12 occur because SnapMirror volumes are read-only entities. ExpressDR DPX Bare Metal Recovery needs the Filer's volume to be in read/write mode since the Filer needs to set up various temporary data structures in order to perform the SnapVault data transfer from that volume back to the intended restore machine. The destination volume of a SnapMirror set is read-only as it is generally synchronizing on a regular basis from its source volume. A volume restored from a smtape NDMP backup is a SnapMirror from tape, and so after the restore, the volume is left in the SnapMirror read-only state. Please consult your NetApp OnTap documentation for additional information on how SnapMirror and SnapMirror to tape operate. To correct this, you will need to use OnTap's snapmirror break <volume-name> command. Please see Catalogic Software Restore Attempts From SnapMirror Secondary Fail for additional information.