Free StoreOnce VSA to Back Dat Lab Up!

Update as of 2024-FEB-02; I’ve no idea if this still works, and knowing HPE links are broken everywhere or they straight up sunsetted it. The premise still holds and you may still learn something, but don’t bank on this actually being useful for a home lab anymore 🙁

If you happened to check out my last post regarding deduplication you’ll probably be calling me out that “hey, dedupe is never free!” True; in performance, in the premium associated with the feature in most systems, etc. it isn’t free. However, there is a 1TB freeware license (good for 3 years) that you can use to set up a StoreOnce virtual appliance all your own! The only catch is that it doesn’t come with a support agreement unless you purchase a license, and you won’t get a license for encryption, either (the only feature that requires a license).

We are going to be focusing on how to use this for backup and data protection, which is one of the best use cases for deduplication. Unlike primary storage, where you’re hoping to eliminate duplicates based on the patterns of the data itself, with secondary storage to store backups and archives, you’re going to benefit from the fact that you’re writing the same data many times over in a typical retention schedule.

Worth noting, keep in mind that this VSA is 1TB pre-reduction. Depending on your data and change rates/retention schedule, you may be able to pack quite a lot into that:

The picture above is probably not typical of a production environment (and in tebibytes not terabytes, but let’s ignore that for this post). Substantial deduplication rates from a lab environment where you’re backing up the same, unchanging data in many cases is different from a business whose data changes frequently. All this to say:

DISCLAIMER: Your dedupe mileage may vary

Preface

For the uninitiated, the HPE StoreOnce platform has been around for a while. It’s a rather robust secondary storage appliance (in physical and virtual flavors) that primarily leverages a protocol called ‘Catalyst’ that handles the inline deduplication, copy and data lifecycle processes, integrity/validation, etc. StoreOnce offers other NAS protocols and virtual tape library (VTL) capabilities, as well, but Catalyst is where all the secret sauce is.

While it has been robust for a long time, the previous G3 appliances left a bit to be desired – chiefly in look/feel of the UI – which can completely change your notion of how ‘modern’ or viable a solution is. I’d love to give you another Example of a scale-out, post-processing appliance that could use some work in that department, but I’ll just leave the breadcrumbs for you on that one…

I digress! The point is, the G4 (current) StoreOnce appliances are so much better than their predecessors. It is a slick UI, much easier to set up, no cumbersome licensing processes for features like Catalyst; all this to say it is a viable platform with some actual curb appeal when it comes to data protection. Most major backup platforms offer a means of writing to Catalyst (Veeam, CommVault, NetBackup, etc.) but I’ll focus on how to integrate this bad boy with Veeam Backup & Replication V10.

Step 1: Acquire the Bits

First thing’s first, you’ll want to hit up the HPE Software Center via https://myenterpriselicense.hpe.com/cwp-ui/evaluation
Once you’re logged in there, you can search the software catalog to get to StoreOnce G4 VSA

You’ll have a couple options, but what we want to do here is get the evaluation software:

Hit the big ol download button and then choose your platform (vSphere, ESXi, or Hyper-V):

Before we go back to get the license we’ll need to deploy the system and get the serial number, which takes us to our next step!

Step 2: Deploy the Appliance

I’m going to be doing this via a vSphere 6.7 environment, so depending on your flavor of hypervisor and environment it may be a smidge different, but all the concepts are the same. Fair warning, this is a relatively beefy virtual appliance from a RAM perspective at 24GB. We’re going to right-click the cluster we want to deploy it on and choose to Deploy OVF Template:

Then we want to point to the package we downloaded for our particular hypervisor setup:

Go through the typical configuration rigamarole. It will by default thick provision the disk, but at 252GB it might be a tall order if it’s a lab or something. I’ve done it thin provision, but it’s typically best to follow vendor best practices.

In the network settings, we’re setting up our management network. If you have separate data network(s) you can add NICs and then configure subnets in the UI later.

If you noticed we only have the one disk, so we need to actually add our 1TB data disk.

Now we can move onto our next step!

Step 3: Configuring the Appliance

Go to your favorite browser and punch in your management IP address, then we’ll go through the wizard-driven process to finish setup.

Now we’re at the point where we configure the storage we added in our previous section. It should detect the added virtual disk and show it as ‘unconfigured’ which is expected. Go ahead and hit ‘Configure’ to start the provisioning process.

This will take a bit, so go ahead and hit OK so we can continue and finish the setup.

In this instance you have a choice – or perhaps merely the illusion of one! As I mentioned before in this post, the free edition isn’t going to get you enterprise-level support, so I opted for No support here. That said, if you were buying a real-deal StoreOnce VSA license, you’d probably want it on.

And just like that, we have a virtual StoreOnce appliance ready to use!

Step 4: Configure Catalyst

Now that our system is set up we can configure data services on it. Log into the management UI via its IP address:

You’ll be greeted by a dashboard with an overview of the system health, configuration, etc. It may still be churning on preparing the storage for use from our previous step, so give it some time (5-10 minutes) and it should be ready to present storage to data services.

Once data services are up and running, you can click on the hyperlink for a particular protocol to actually create a store. Let’s go ahead and create a Catalyst store.

Really we just need to give it a name and we can create it with defaults, just like that. It’s also worth noting that not every independent software vendor (ISV) implements all features! Make sure you check documentation and integration guidelines. In our example with Veeam, at least as of the date of writing this post, the ‘Data Immutability’ setting in ‘Security Settings’ is not respected by the Veeam Backup & Replication server. It is a feature in Catalyst that Veeam has not yet implemented.

Nevertheless, let’s take a look at the advanced settings:

Under the ‘Transfer Policies’ we have two options here for Low Bandwidth and High Bandwidth. What this tells this particular Catalyst Store is “where do you want the deduplication heavy lifting to occur?”

If you choose Low Bandwidth you are letting the backup application’s data mover (e.g. Veeam proxy) communicate with the Catalyst Store to determine what blocks are unique and only send what is new.

If you choose High Bandwidth you are sending all of the data in its uncompressed form to the StoreOnce device, where it will then do the deduplication of data at ingest.

It is most often recommended to use Low Bandwidth mode, since it will be a more efficient transfer of data, so long as your data mover can handle it. This is especially true for a virtual appliance like ours, where we want to offload as much performance workload as possible.

The other settings here are just for event history, then Physical (i.e. how much of the underlying disk have we actually consumed) or Logical (i.e. amount of data written with deduplication savings, regardless of underlying disk consumption) quotas.

After we click ‘Create’ we now need to configure access to the newly provisioned store. You’ll notice you have no clients with access, so let’s add one.

A Catalyst client is essentially the user credentials required to access this store. A backup application or ISV has to know how to access the Catalyst API, regardless of credentials, which is part of what makes it a secure protocol when it comes to things like ransomware. The extra layer of authentication lets us ensure that

1) You don’t have anyone accessing the store for reading or writing just by virtue of having access to a Catalyst-integrated application

AND

2) You can provision access to individual stores even inside of a single StoreOnce appliance for an extra layer of separation

Once you have the Catalyst Store created, a Catalyst client created, and allowed access to it, all that is left is to give the backup application access to it.

Step 5: Add the Repo to Veeam

In your VBR console, go to the Backup Infrastructure view and then add a new repository.

You’ll want to choose ‘Deduplicating storage appliance’

Enter the FQDN or IP address of the StoreOnce device and add your credentials for the Catalyst client.

Assuming we did everything right, we should have access to the Catalyst Store we created and it will let us connect.

Click through the next few menus and align that to however you have your Veeam environment set up, then you will have a new repository available to begin sending backups to!

The first time you set up a backup job to point to this new repository, Veeam will prompt you to change the settings to what is optimal (synthetic full behavior, deduplication and compression settings, block size, etc.) It would be wise to do so.

Step 6: License It Before You Forget!

I think this heading was more targeted at me than anyone reading this, as I almost forgot!

You’ll want to head back to the HPE Software Center at
https://myenterpriselicense.hpe.com/cwp-ui/evaluation

From there, search for StoreOnce G4 again and then, this time, click the license option:

Once you’ve clicked the link, click ‘Download’ where you’ll be prompted for your system’s serial number. You can get your serial number from the System Dashboard in your StoreOnce.

Now go back to the licensing portal, enter your serial number, and make sure you choose the correct hypervisor for your deployment.

After that just click ‘Activate’ and you’ll be redirected to the download page for your license, as well as a PDF containing instructions on how to license the system (hint: it’s easy peasy. Just go to Settings > License Management > Add license)

Final Thoughts

I hope that this has been helpful to someone! If you have a small shop or a test environment that needs a robust and secure backup target, or a lab environment where you want to kick the tires on the StoreOnce product line before buying a license/appliance, then the freeware VSA could be a great way to fill that gap. Likewise if you have something like Veeam or another ISV capable of leveraging Catalyst you can make a lot of space out of a little storage, which goes especially far for home and homelab users.

Knowing about StoreOnce and how it works with Veeam is going to be important for a later installment, where we talk about how to get the benefits and ease of StoreOnce deduplication in the cloud via HPE Cloud Volumes Backup. It’s a unique offering that can really simplify the way you manage data, lower costs, and still get all that cloud goodness without some of the complexities and caveats normally associated with “the cloud”!