Avamar Capacity

Server utilization, as reported in the Server section of the Avamar Administrator GUI can be misleading. According to the Avamar Administrator help, it shows the "Percentage of total available server storage capacity currently used". This percentage is the highest storage space used on any of the nodes. So if one of the nodes shows 43% useage, then server utilization will show 43% also.

A server utilization of 43% leads one to believe that it is 43% of the "Total Capacity". This is not true, and is very misleading. It is actually the percentage of (Total capacity X 65%). Why 65%? Because that is the storage space threshold when Avamar becomes read only, and backups have to be deleted to get total storage below that mark. This threshold might be different in certain situations, and can be verified by running "avmaint config --ava | grep disk" in the SSH console to the Avamar utility node, and checking the diskreadonly="65" parameter.

To check the actual space used by backups, run the following command: status.dpn and look for the column called %Full. This will show you how much actual space is being used on the Avamar nodes. When this percentage starts getting closer to 63%, then it is time to start deleting backups and clear up space on the Avamar.

So there are two types of storage space percentages reported. One is the actual storage space which is found by using the status.dpn command, and one is a "virtual" storage space reported by the GUI. When the virtual storage space gets to 80%, then a warning is sent out saying that the actual space is getting close to the actual 65% and you should start looking into deleting backups to clear up space on the Avamar.