Avamar: How to register and activate multiple clients with the same short name.

When backing up database servers that are also virtual machine, it is best practice to backup the server with the Avamar client installed locally on the server. This will prevent data integrity issues and if the server is also part of a cluster, it will keep quorum between multiple servers. These issues sometimes appear when taking an image level snapshot of the VM, a process used by the Avamar proxies.

Even while taking file level backups of the VM with the client, you will still need a periodic image level backup using the proxies in order to make disaster recovery time more efficient. This may need to be done monthly for patching at staggered times to keep the above mentioned issues to a minimum.

An issue happens when you attempt to activate (or register) the virtual machine with Avamar after you have already activated it with either vCenter or the local client. The error message below tells you that it is already registered

avagent Error <7481>: Unable to register /domain/clientname with Administrator rrs.avamarserver.customer.com:28001'* 115 * nodename cannot be registered because it already exists in another domain' (115) avagent.d Info: Client activation error.

The following instructions show how to allow clients with identical short names to be activated 

1) Using PuTTY, SSH into the Avamar server as the Linux OS admin user

2) Make a backup copy of the file by coping the line below into the session.

 /usr/local/avamar/var/mc/server_data/prefs/mcserver.xml 
cp -p /usr/local/avamar/var/mc/server_data/prefs/mcserver.xml /usr/local/avamar/var/mc/server_data/prefs/x-mcserver.xml.YYMMDD

3) Use vi to edit mcserver.xml

vi /usr/local/avamar/var/mc/server_data/prefs/mcserver.xml

and search for the line containing “allow_duplicate”

/allow_duplicate

4) Change the value of the key from false to true by typing the “i” on your keyboard and moving the cursor.

Hit the Esc key and then :wq to save (write) and quite.

Restart MCS so the new parameters are read and can take effect

dpnctl stop mcs
dpnctl start mcs,sched

Now you can activate the second instance of the virtual machine.