If you are in search of Commvault interview questions, then you have landed at the right place. In this blog, we have collected the most frequently asked Commvault Interview Questions and Answers for both freshers and experienced, which will help you to ace the interview. The questions presented here are curated based on the opinions of Commvault industry experts.
But before starting, let’s understand how the demand is continuously increasing for Commvault professionals worldwide:
Now, I hope you have got a clear idea of Commvault’s demand, career opportunities, and salary insights. To simplify your interview preparation process, we have segregated Commvault interview questions they are:
Commvault is a data management platform that assists organizations with data backup and recovery, cloud, virtualization, disaster recovery, security, and compliance.
Commvault software consists of modules to backup, restore, archive, replicate, and search data.
Simpana is one of the features of Commvault’s enterprise backup software platform that is specially designed for backup, archive, and reporting data. Simpana is the new version of the Deduplication process introduced by Commvault.
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The key features of Commvault are listed below:
The various ways of doing High availability are listed below:
A storage policy is a data management entity with a set of rules that describe the lifecycle management of protected data in the Subclient’s content. It manages the Subclient’s data even when it stays on other servers in Commcell.
The set of rules includes how to manage data, protect data, where it will reside, and other management options such as compression, encryption, and deduplication of data in protected storage.
Below mentioned are the different types of storage policies:
We have only one primary copy and to that, we will be having different types of auxiliary/ secondary types of copies. The list of secondary copies available are as follows:
To configure the Commvault Proxy on the new client, follow the below steps:
Step1: Right-click on the client computer to be used as a Commvault proxy from the Commvault browser and select the properties.
Step2: From the properties dialog box, click on the Network button and select the configure firewall settings checkbox.
Step3: Click on the options tab and choose “this computer is in DMZ and will work as a proxy checkbox.”
Step4: Click on the incoming connections tab and select add.
Step5: Select the CommServe_client_name from the list.
Step6: From the State list, select RESTRICTED and click OK.
Step7: From the State list, select RESTRICTED and click OK.
A Commcell environment is the logical grouping of all the software components that secure, transfer, and manage data and information. It contains a CommServe host, MediaAgent, and Clients.
CommServe - It is the central management component that coordinates and executes all Commcell operations.
MediaAgent - It is a data transmission manager in the Commcell environment, which enables high-performance data movement and handles data storage libraries.
Client - A Client is a logical group of agents that defines the protection, management, and movement of data associated with the client.
A Silo is a collection of disk volume folders that are associated with the Deduplication Database. It contains the deduplicated data that are written on the disk storage.
A hash algorithm is used in the deduplication process in the Commvault whenever a block of data is read from the source and a unique signature is generated for the block of data using a hash algorithm.
The default block size for deduplicated storage policies is 128kb.
This can be a generalized answer and the ratio that we could maintain is as follows:
You can download and view the reports in Commvault through the web console.
You can access reports through the cloud services portal and web console.
Cloning is nothing but making a copy of something while a snapshot makes an initial copy and then makes subsequent changes to it. Both cloning and snapshot are considered to be good approaches for disaster recovery.
IRM stands for the IntelliSnap Recovery Manager that performs hardware storage snapshots directly into a recovery/protection process for smaller environments. It offers fast and easy Snap backups, centralized configuration, application support, etc.
The following steps show how IRM works:
Commvault software runs a building block approach for data management. A building block is a combination of server and storage to protect data sets regardless of the type or origin of the data.
Deduplication Building Blocks will allow you to protect huge amounts of data with minimal infrastructure, better scalability, and faster backups.
DDB seeding is a predefined workflow that allows transferring initial baseline backup among two sites using a removable disk drive.
ContinuousDataReplicator (CDR) replicates data from source to destination. It provides data protection and recovery support for all types of data including application data and file systems.
Commvault presents the most efficient backup and restores data in enterprises from mainstream applications, operating systems, and databases. Commvault backup uses agents to interface with applications or files and facilitates the transfer of data from production systems to protected environments.
There are various types of backups available in Commvault:
Some of the common or more frequent backup issues reported are as follows:
The backup copy operation allows you to copy snapshots of the data to any media. The primary snapshot stores the metadata information associated with the snap backups and when the backup copy operation is running, the primary snapshot data is copied to the media associated with the primary copy.
The backup copy can be configured in two ways:
Performing a backup is like capturing data for all of the virtual machines in a subclient.
The below-mentioned steps will help you perform a VMware backup:
1. Navigate to client computers from the Commcell console and select Virtualization-client->virtual server->VMware->backup-set.
2. Now right click on a subclient and click backup.
Select the backup type:
3. If you want to modify default modify settings or specify advanced options, then click Advanced.
4. To run a job immediately, click on Immediate or to create a backup schedule, then click configure to specify the schedule and click ok.
5. Click on Home->Job Controller to track the progress of the job.
Transport modes are selected automatically for restore and backups based on the VSA proxy used and also when the virtual machines being backed up or restored.
The following are the different types of transport modes available in VMware:
First thing first, the backup admin will have to monitor whether all the scheduled jobs are running as they are designated. If not, then they have to go through the jobs and understand the fault and rectify the same.
Further, they have to involve themselves with some of the following health checkups:
This should be an honest reply back to the interviewer because this is a real-time question that can be answered based on the experience available.
During the backup copy operations, the following activities are executed: