Live mounting SQL Databases is one of the most powerful and transformational features in Rubrik. And I’m not using that word lightly, you can positively impact the speed in which applications can be delivered with multiple, instant, space efficient copies of DBs mounted directly from your backups.
I’ve seen customers live mount 2TB+ SQL DBs in 60 seconds, and when combined with self-service via UI/PowerShell, this gives DBAs the ability to query and pull data from backups without having to transfer the entire DB across the network or rely on a backup team to restore the data for them.
Its no wonder Rubrik has customers switching in droves from a legacy dump and sweep approach, but as you demo this you can feel the infrastructure team supporting it beginning to wonder “how do you monitor this new-found DBA super power?”. I hear questions like:
- How much space are the mounts using? Note: it’s just the changes, but how big?
- How many mounts does each user have? Can I set a quota and alert?
- How old are the mounts? Can I set a max age and alert?
To answer all these questions and more; here’s a report I built using a PowerShell script for you to plug into all your Rubrik clusters:
It’s designed to prompt for Rubrik credentials on first run, save them securely, then be run headless as a scheduled task sending out the below email report:
Extract to C:\RubrikSQLLiveMountReportv1 or your chosen directory. Configure the variables and give it a run. Ensure you schedule the task using the same user that ran the script, as the credentials are encrypted for only that user on that server.
You can configure maximum user quotas and live mount ages, both which then flag the username or live mount age to highlight those out of compliance. You can contact the offending user by clicking on their email address or go to the corresponding Rubrik cluster by clicking on its name.
Neither are implemented as a hard quota, because I don’t believe anybody would actually want to stop a DBA doing their job by default, just report on who might be over utilizing resources so you can politely ask why and how long for.
If you’d like a similar report for Oracle DBs, or any other live mount, let me know via the Drift chat so I can prioritize accordingly. If you found this useful you can help me by following me on twitter below. Happy live mounting,