Symantec NetBackup 7 – Incorrect Disk Pool Available Space with Media Server Deduplication Puredisk Disk Pool

I ran across this bug onsite at a customer and after some searching, I found out it is a bug that has a hotfix that fixes the issue. It will also be included in NetBackup v7.0.1 which is due out anytime.

Problem: The disk pools available space isn’t being reported correctly, so NetBackup thinks that the disk pool is full and backups to that disk pool results in “Status 129” errors (Disk pool full, insufficent disk space). Even after expiring images, the disk capacity is still full.

Steps Taken: I thought at first that perhaps NetBackup wasn’t “cleaning up” the images appropriately or that perhaps NetBackup was flagging the images to be cleaned but the Puredisk Deduplication Engine (PDDE) wasn’t cleaning up the data correctly, since I’ve seen that issue with standalone Puredisk nodes before. So I performed an expiration and cleanup manually by following the steps below:

Here’s how to manually force the clean up of NetBackup images after expiring them from the catalog:
install_pathNetBackupbinadmincmdnbdelete -allvolumes -force
install_pathNetBackupbinadmincmdbpimage -cleanup -allclient 

In Media Server Deduplication Pool environments, wait for PDDE to run its maintenance tasks for cleanup to see the disk space get cleaned.
Or you can run them manually; 
install_pathVeritaspddecrcontrol.exe –processqueue
install_pathVeritaspddecrcollect -v -m +1,+2 –noreport

Resolution: In my case, manually executing the cleanup didn’t result in additional disk space available. This is a known bug which has a patch that can be downloaded and applied to your Master and Media servers. Please see this technote article: http://seer.entsupport.symantec.com/docs/350190.htm

After applying the patch, the disk pools now show the correct available space and backups are working again!