I’ve had an issue recently where a new installation of Dell AppAssure 5 did not keep the correct number of snapshots based on a chosen retention policy. The issue after working with a awfully slow tech support over the course of three weeks was to update to a specific newer release of Dell AppAssure Version 5.3.1.59332. Here is what happened:
[the problem]
My environment was running two 2008 Server R2 Standard (one as a file server and one as a domain controller) virtual machines on VMWare ESXi 5.1 and one physical 2008 Server R2 Standard member server as the AppAssure Core. The Core’s default retention policy was set to keep 5 daily incremental Recovery Points (RP), 3 weekly RPs and 2 monthly RPs in the default repository, but only 4 or 5 daily incremental snapshots would be retained on each protected machine no matter how the retention policy was set.
I even attempted to set each protected machine to use a custom retention policy to see if that would take place and modified it to only keep a single incremental RP. Nothing seemed to make a difference. Still the Core would always keep four or five daily RPs.
[solution]
Since Dell purchased AppAssure, there have been some major issues with AppAssure 5. Technical support is one and lack of documentation is the other. Both make what could be a great product very difficult to troubleshoot and thus recommend. Here’s what I finally learned:
[step 1] Download and upgrade to AppAssure 5 Version: 5.3.1.59332.
[step 2] Reboot the Core.
This resolved the issues with the default retention policy not taking effect on all of my your protected machines.
That’s it.