CommVault

On client computer edit C:\Users\[username]\AppData\Local\cvaddinhook.xml and add loglevel entry to the XML file.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<Settings>
  <add key="RecallBaseUrl" value=""https://webconsole.yourdomain.com/webconsole/RestServlet/Recall" />
  <add key="loglevel" value="9" />
</Settings>

Logs will be written to C:\Users\[username]\AppData\Local\CVArchiverAddin.log.

We just installed Windows 2016 CORE. As recommened you typically should install all available Windows Updates before you move forward and install other software.

When we started to install Commvault File Agent and Virtual Server Agent setup failed with errors in eventlog and never completed. If you search Application event log you will find two errors logged:

Log Name: Application
Source: .NET Runtime
Date: 8/3/2017 3:59:44 PM
Event ID: 1026
Task Category: None
Level: Error
Keywords: Classic
User: N/A
Computer: HOST1.example.local
Description:
Application: setup.exe
Framework Version: v4.0.30319
Description: The process was terminated due to an unhandled exception.
Exception Info: System.ComponentModel.Win32Exception

You are using Simpana 10 Exchange Mailbox archiving (not the previous Exchange Mailbox Archiver) in CommVault and you may have seen that your OnePass-Stubs have broken recall links in Quick Look. This is only visible in Outlook Web Access or on mobile. If you click the Quick Look link inside an e-mail you are redirected to https://webconsole/webconsole/RestServlet/Recall. Let me note that this is excactly the link that your users will see. Your global Recall Service URL configued for the archiver host is ignored.

Symptom:

• Recall Service is configured with hostname that contains "webconsole" in the hostname e.g. https://webconsole.example.com
• All Quick Look links in e-mails contain URLs to https://webconsole/webconsole/RestServlet/Recall and your custom hostname is ignored.
• Recalls fail as the hostname cannot resolved to a host.

Solution:

In your Web Console under Reports > eDiscovery Exception Report you are able to create a reports to identify possible issues in the indexing process. 

Bug:

If you try to create such a eDiscovery Exception Report and you click on a search engine you will see a greyed our form with a moving progress circle and after a timeout interval (~20seconds) you get an error message 3011,Search Engine service is down and a note that the CommVault Search Engine may not running. But CommVault Search Engine is up and running fine.

The root cause is that the Commvault Web Server installed on a different machine cannot connect to the CommVault Search Engine as the Windows Firewall is blocking the connection. Commvault missed to add the C:\Program Files\CommVault\Simpana\CIServer\bin\tomcat6.exe executable to the firewall exceptions.

Solution:

If you have installed Commvault Web Console on a Windows Core server you may wonder why you cannot reach the tomcat server on this host. You have for sure configured the firewall with the setup and added the exceptions to the windows firewall, but it is still boarded-up.

Reason:

• Commvault has missed to add the tomcat process to the exception list as the executable is not inside Simpana\Base folder.

Solution:

• Add the exception manually by running the command:
  
  Simpana 10.x:
  netsh advfirewall firewall add rule action=allow dir=in program="C:\Program Files\CommVault\Simpana\Apache\bin\tomcat6.exe" name="CommVault_Process_1_tomcat6 / C:\Program Files\CommVault\Simpana\Apache\bin\tomcat6.exe" enable=yes
  
  Simpana 11.x:
  netsh advfirewall firewall add rule action=allow dir=in program="C:\Program Files\Commvault\ContentStore\Apache\bin\tomcat.exe" name="CommVault_Process_1_tomcat / C:\Program Files\Commvault\ContentStore\Apache\bin\tomcat.exe" enable=yes

History:

I just installed a Web Console on Windows 2012 R2 Core server and learned how insecure this system is out of the box. You may have worked through the Post-Installation Configurations for Web Server and Web Console. This ends with an highly insecure web server configuration. The SSL encryption is sooo weak that I tend to say you can also leave SSL switched off. You can check your server with SSL Server Test. Commvault default with Java 7 will end with the most worse test result of F.

If you are running Commvault Exchange Mailbox Archiver and Public Folder Archiver you may wonder about Install Outlook Add-In - Administrator that suggest some strange ways to deploy the Outlook Add-in. They require you to run EXE command line tools via Logon scripts in a GPO. A horrible bad idea to deploy software... ! Below is the way how you should deploy it to have full controll about all. Do not follow the documentation of Commvault!

This documentation has been written for Windows x64 and this means Windows 7/8/10. An installation on Windows x86 has not been tested, but can be easily adapted.

First of all there are some pre-requirements for this software to run. These are as follows:

You may run Commvault Backup Software or any other on a Hyper-V Cluster and your VSS Snapshots of the virtual machines fail from time to time.

At CommVault Virtual iDataAgent using Microsoft VSS and Hyper-V Installation, Backup and Restore problems they describe several reason for this type of failure. There recommend many missing Microsoft hotfixes (you should really install) and a disabled automount, but the top one issue - that happens most often from my expierence is - that you are just running out of disk space in one of the VMs located on the Cluster Shared Volume.

If you are installing a CommCell Console GUI on your Administrator PC it normally download and installs all patches from the CommCell Server to the client. You do not need to do anything manually, but with this bug these feature is more or less broken.

Symptoms:

• CommCell Console GUI 9.x SP3 is not installing patches at all.
• CommCell Console GUI starts up and update dialog is shown. After you press Yes for installing the patches, nothing at all happens and patches are not installed.

Reason:

• Upgrade logs complain about some missing dependencies that are not fullfilled. Looks like the patch references table on CommCell is broken again and missing required references.

Solution:

• Upgrade your CommCell from SP3 to SP3a

History:

If you are running Simpana 9.0 SP2a and you backup Windows 2003 servers they are no longer backed up after you have installed SP2a. There is no notice or warning at all. You will not get an email if the job has failed to backup your data. Hopefully you have no data loss before you came aware of this bug...

Symtoms:

• Windows 2003 machines are not backed up. Windows 2008 or Windows R2 is not affected.
• Alert system does not notify you about the data backup failure.
• It does not matter if you use VSS or not.
• It does not matter if you have selected some files or all files for backup.
• Only the Commvault Jobs folder and SystemState is backed up.

Solution: