Is there a way to delete multiple clients at a time?

I would recommend looking into using mccli for this.

mccli client --help

syntax: mccli client

        :

                        [--mcsaddr=String]:     Address of MCS

                        [--mcspasswd=String]:   MCS Password

                        [--mcsport=Integer]:    MCS port

                        [--mcsprofile=String]:  MCS profile key

                        [--mcsuserid=String]:   MCS User Name

                        [--normalize=String(false)]:    Normalize output for byte and date/time values

                        [--xml=Boolean]:        Output in XML format

        and :

...

                delete: Delete a client

                        [--domain=String(/)]:   Client's domain

                        <--name=String>:        Client's name

...

I'm not aware of any out-of-the-box script you can use to manage DTLT accounts as you've described but there is an mccli scripting guide available on the support site that may be helpful for developing such a script.

This thread is a little old, but I ran into the same problem, needing to retire (or in you case, deleting) multiple clients at a time. So just offering what I did in case it will be helpful as I could not find anything else on this forum.

I did not find anything in the MCCLI ref guide about being able to reference a csv or xml file (but I am sure there is a way that I just don't know of) so I did this in a kind of kluge way.

1.     gather list of client names you want to act upon using the following command as root:

mccli client show --domain=/clients

*I could not find a way to export to a text file, so I ran a the command in putty using session logging to a text file so the output would be captured or you can just copy from session window if there are not too many and the buffer is big enough

2.     take output of putty log and parse it into an excel column

*copy the output from the putty log and paste it into excel and use the data function in excel called 'text to columns' so you have a nice neat list of each client in a single column with one client per row

[example:

srv304

srv305

srv306

...]

3.     use the 'concatenate' function to easily create unique command for each

Steps:

-format column to "text" only (otherwise the = sign will mess with you)

-paste the text on next line (without quotes) into column A1

"mccli client retire --domain=srv1234.swedishamerican.org/VirtualMachines --name="

*or if you are deleting just replace 'retire' with 'delete'

-paste the text from step 2 into column B

-enter the function on the following line into column C

"=CONCATENATE(A1,B1)"

-copy and paste output in column C (with option "values only") into column D

-cut or copy contents of column D into a text document

-verify commands look correct and try a cut and paste of the command into putty and verify it is working

[example:

mccli client retire --domain=srv1234.swedishamerican.org/VirtualMachines--name=srv304

mccli client retire --domain=srv1234.swedishamerican.org/VirtualMachines--name=srv305

mccli client retire --domain=srv1234.swedishamerican.org/VirtualMachines--name=srv306

...]

-then go whole hog and cut/paste as many rows as you want and mmcli will process them one at a time (hint: it seems like the output to screen gets a little funky but you will be able to see the exit codes and you can verify in MCS or in another putty window that the clients are being deleted or retired correctly

Let me know if you have any questions here or on twitter @johnbrek or email jbrekelbaum@gmail.com

jbrekelbaum method helped me. It still works. I have avamar ver 7.1

This was a huge help! Just migrated to vCenter 5.5 appliance and needed to retire all my VM's (Avamar 7.1). Wasn't thrilled about doing 1 by 1 for over 100 vms. Here's the command I used to retire all the VM's:

mccli client show --domain=/vmware | awk '{print $1}' | xargs -i mccli client retire --domain=/vmware --name='{}'

Please note that it will spit out some bogus lines the first couple, but it just fails and moves on. Hope this helps someone too.

Jason

This really blows my mind that we are now at Avamar version 7.2 and EMC has still not found it important to provide a useful way of managing multiple clients at a time. This functionality is at the Caveman level of progress and should be a given but here we are at 7.2 and still need to resort to fancy Excel tricks just to perform what should be a basic task.

Avamar has the ability to backup thousands of systems in a short 8-10hr backup window but the Admin responsible for the system has no easy way to manage those 1,000's of clients once they have been registered within the Mgmt console..Sweet Jesus!

The same can be said about not being able to Export certain information found within many "Views" within the console. The system has the ability to generate said view but someone seems to have forgotten to include a basic "Export" button that is found on other views within the Mgmt console.

My apologies for this rant but its struck a nerve with me as I am in this same situation as the OP (again) but this time I have thousands of clients to deal with instead of only a few hundred. This hunting and pecking of one client at a time is mind numbing. I wont even go into the silliness of the console wanting to change my selection after each "retire" event and then needing to find where I left off before

We submitted a Request for Enhancement about a year ago for changes to the client management piece.  I strongly urge anyone with the same issue/concern to raise an RFE as well.  With EMC pushing customer to Backup and Recovery Manager, I don't think this will ever be implemented before EMC retires the Avamar GUI, in favor of B&RM.

One of the customer had a similar problem where they wanted to delete the clients that has NO backups and I ended up adding an option in proxycp.jar

Following command will list all the clients that has no backups

 java -jar proxycp.jar --listclientswithnobackups --domain 

Following command will actually delete all the clients that has no backups

java -jar proxycp.jar --deleteclientswithnobackups --domain 

Hope this helps

Regards

Amol Powar

That's very useful, but only if you want to delete clients with no backups.  It would be fantastic to have a way to retire clients, en masse. The proxycp.jar script can handle retiring multiple VMs in one pass, but you can't use it for traditional clients.  We often retire a few dozen physical servers, and it's an excruciating process, compared to doing it  in CLI command for VMware.  Deleting them before their backups expire isn't an option - we must keep the backups until they expire normally, and sometimes we have to reactivate a client.

Actually, It works with traditional clients too, you need to pass an undocumented flag --filename with the list of clients.

In the following example you can see that I created a file and added the complete path of the client

admin@aevm39:~/>: cat /tmp/clients2retire.txt 
/clients/aevm23.amol.local


admin@aevm39:~/>: java -jar /usr/local/avamar/bin/proxycp.jar --retirevms --filename /tmp/clients2retire.txt 
======================= Starting ProxyCP ==========================


Proxycp : v2.53
Date    : September 16, 2015 7:36:54 AM PDT


COMMAND : java -jar proxycp.jar --retirevms --filename /tmp/clients2retire.txt 


VDP/Nemo Detected : false
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Current Backup Expiry date will be preserved
Sep 16, 2015 7:36:59 AM org.apache.axis2.deployment.util.TempFileManager 
INFO: TempFileManager::unable to delete /tmp/axis2-tmp-4658707276164200224.tmp
/clients/aevm23.amol.local                                             Retired ? /MC_RETIRED/aevm23.amol.local2015.09.16.07.37.01
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Closing Connection Pool : September 16, 2015 7:37:01 AM PDT

Note : I'll update the --help to document --filename in next build

Regards

Amol Powar

Question:  Is there any documentation for proxycp.jar command?

Thanks

Joe Despres

Thanks!  That's actually quite handy!  I'll try this in a few weeks and comment.

You can use --help to see all the options in proxycp or use --documentation which will actually create a webpage and display options along with example

Just to Add to gather the complete List of clients ,you can now exports the List of the backup Clients .What i did ,i have exported report from avamar MC in .csv file which consist complete status of the backup (failed,completed ,etc..).So i have opened this file using excel so in which you can filter the clients as in my case i wanted to Retire the Clients for which backup is getting failed due to those VMs are not present in the Vcenter so just filtered the Error tab and i get the list of the clients which i wanted to retire and then followed your precedure which worked best for me ..

Thank you .

Resurrecting this thread because we're still at 7.2 and this problem still exists. BRM is being phased out to make room for MSM and then CLP (?) so I don't think this will be addressed soon. To simplify things, I created a DPA report to list out all of my VM's without a backup OR report a "No VM" error message. I then concatenated the fields to give me a full mccli client retire command in an email. That way I can just copy paste all of lines into ssh and let it go to town. Fingers crossed MSM delivers something useful...

In 2018 and on 7.5 this is still the only way to accomplish this. I am in the middle of a vcenter migration and am using dynamic tagging. Because we are live migrating VM's the UID's are the same so the original VM's need to be retired before the new vcenter will pick them up.

If you are migrating all of the VM's in an Avamar domain you can right click it and retire. But if like me you are doing batches then the CLI entries are the best way to go.