As of September 2016 EMC released Data Domain Virtual Edition 3.0. Possibly the fastest way to describe DDve 3.0 is a software appliance dedicated to Storage Protection supporting different protocols including CIFS and NFS. As a such DDve should always be paired with a Backup solution of your choice like VMware Data Protection appliance, Veeam or other solutions you might have available and capable of leveraging bespoke storage protocols including the proprietary Data Domain Boost. The virtual edition runs on the DD OS and keeps the core enterprise features that made this solution very popular.
As I like experimenting and learning more about new offerings I couldn’t resist and found out the Data Domain virtual edition ships with different capabilities and licensing. Luckily the evaluation edition can support up to 500 GB where there is no limitation on the functionalities other than maximum storage supported that can be purchased in increments of 1 TB up to 96 TB. This is great news for my home lab and decided to give it go hence this article which I hope can be interesting for the ones who want to try Data Domain virtual edition in their home lab.
I have organised this article in two parts: installation and configuration. Let’s start with the first part:
Data Domain virtual edition Installation
Data Domain virtual edition 3.0 is available for both VMware and Hyper-V platforms. Depending on your needs you might want to download the proper version available from this page:
https://uk.emc.com/products-solutions/trial-software-download/data-domain-virtual-edition.htm
Once the zip file has been downloaded (roughly 1.7 GB) copy and extract the content to a location from where we can then deploy the OVF file to our Host. In my case I will be using the VMware version of the Data Domain appliance. Steps to deploy the OVF are pretty easy as shown in the screenshots below.
The zip file includes the OVA package, an evaluation file along with a Readme with a quick description. At this point let’s locate the OVA file to be deployed
The OVA package reads like the screenshot below
Let’s accept the Licence Agreement
We can now specify the location in the object structure where the appliance will be deployed
In my case I will be using the first configuration specs.
As per official documentation other specs are available
Next is to choose the VMware Datastore where to deploy the storage appliance. I would recommend using the Thick Provisioning Lazy Zeroed for this exercise
We can now choose how to map the vNICs to our environment. We can also choose to set the IP addressing automatically with DHCP (default choice) and IPv6 instead of IPv4 if available
As per usual a quick summary to review the general settings. What it is important at this point is not to “Power on after deployment” as we need to add the first Disk which will be used for our storage. The appliance already ships with 2 Disks but are used by the system
As expected in the task pane the notifications about the OVF deployment
We can now edit the VM appliance configuration. The purpose is to add the Disk which will be used for storage
As per screenshot below let’s add a new hard drive
Please note that the evaluation version supports up to 0.5 TB. An initial Disk of 200 GB would be more than sufficient for our testing and leave space for adding extra drives before reaching the license limit. As per usual I would recommend using the Thick Provisioning with Lazy Zeroed
We can now Power on the virtual appliance and proceed with the second part of the article on the Data Domain virtual edition first time configuration.
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