Download EMC BACKUP AND RECOVERY OPTIONS FOR VSPEX FOR VIRTUALIZED ORACLE 11GR2

DESIGN AND IMPLEMENTATION GUIDE
EMC BACKUP AND RECOVERY OPTIONS FOR
VSPEX FOR VIRTUALIZED ORACLE 11GR2
EMC VSPEX
September 2013
Copyright © 2013 EMC Corporation. All rights reserved. Published in the USA.
Published September 2013
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EMC BACKUP AND RECOVERY OPTIONS FOR VSPEX FOR VIRTUALIZED ORACLE 11gR2
Part Number H12347
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Design And Implementation Guide: VSPEX with EMC Backup and Recovery for
Virtualized Oracle 11gR2
Contents
Contents........................................................................................................... 3
Chapter 1:
Introduction .............................................................. 4
Purpose of this guide ....................................................................................... 4
Business value ................................................................................................. 4
Scope ............................................................................................................... 6
Essential reading ............................................................................................. 6
Solution Overviews........................................................................................... 6
Implementation and Design Guides for Oracle .................................................... 6
VSPEX Proven Infrastructure .............................................................................. 6
Chapter 2:
Solution overview and sizing ......................................... 7
Solution architecture........................................................................................ 7
Oracle 11gR2 Overview .................................................................................... 8
Backup and Recovery Overview ..................................................................... 10
EMC Avamar Deduplication Backup Software and System .................................. 10
EMC Data Domain Deduplication Storage System.............................................. 10
Backup and Recovery Sizing............................................................................ 10
Chapter 3:
Oracle backup and recovery considerations .................... 12
Multistreaming backups ................................................................................ 12
Incremental backups...................................................................................... 12
Chapter 4:
Configuring Oracle Backups ........................................ 14
Avamar backup strategies overview............................................................... 14
On-demand backups in a stand-alone environment........................................... 14
On-demand backups in a high-availability environment..................................... 15
Avamar with Data Domain backup strategies overview.................................. 17
Chapter 5:
Solution Validation Methodologies ............................... 18
Chapter 6:
Reference Documentation .......................................... 19
Validating backup and recovery ....................................................................... 18
Product documentation.................................................................................. 19
EMC Data Domain Deduplication Storage System.......................................... 19
Other documentation ..................................................................................... 19
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Chapter 1: Introduction
Purpose of this guide
This Solution Guide describes how to design, implement, and size EMC backup and
recovery solutions for VSPEX Proven Infrastructure for Virtualized Oracle.
EMC VSPEX for Oracle 11gR2 solution:
•
Provides customers with a proven solution, capable of hosting virtualized
Oracle solution at a consistent performance level.
•
Enables customers to quickly and consistently deploy and protect a
virtualized Oracle 11gR2 server instance On a VSPEX Private Cloud
Infrastructure.
•
Runs on a VMware vSphere virtualization layer.
•
Leverages the highly available EMC VNX family, which provides the storage.
•
Leverages EMC backup and recovery products, EMC Avamar® and EMC Data
Domain®.
The following documents describe how to implement and deploy, with best practices,
Oracle on any VSPEX private cloud (inclusive of storage, compute, and network) with
VMware:
EMC VSPEX for Virtualized Oracle Database 11gOLTP Design Guide
EMC VSPEX for Virtualized Oracle Database 11gOLTP Implementation Guide
Business value
Database Management Systems Software (DBMS) continues to be the dominant
software used to manage data in nearly all commercial segments. This growth is
expected to:
•
Continue despite the increasing market share of other data management
tools, for example in-memory and NoSQL databases.
•
Accelerate as customers continue to diversify the infrastructures and
supporting technologies and drive towards more hardware and software
appliances and configurations.
The VSPEX Proven Infrastructure for Oracle 11gR2 focuses on helping EMC partners
understand the value that the VNX series, EMC Backup and Recovery systems, and
Oracle bring to customers who often have growing, isolated IT environments that run
server-centric applications and who face increasing Oracle backup and recovery
issues.
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Design And Implementation Guide: VSPEX with EMC Backup and Recovery for
Virtualized Oracle 11gR2
The VSPEX solution is designed to meet the Oracle 11gR2 database challenges that
customers face, while enabling customers to grow in performance, scalability,
reliability, and automation. With VSPEX you can consolidate your database
applications and its associated data onto a single centralized storage platform that
enables you to more effectively manage the exploding growth in data that is
challenging businesses today.
EMC has joined forces with industry leading providers of IT infrastructure to create a
complete virtualization solution that accelerates the deployment of a private cloud
and virtualized Oracle.
VSPEX enables customers to accelerate their IT transformation with faster
deployment, more simplicity, greater choice, higher efficiency, and lower risk.
Validation by EMC ensures predictable performance and enables customers to select
technology that leverages existing IT infrastructure while eliminating planning, sizing,
and configuration burdens. VSPEX provides Oracle infrastructures for customers who
are looking to simplify the environment while at the same time gaining more choice in
individual stack components.
EMC backup and recovery solutions – EMC Avamar and EMC Data Domain -deliver the
protection confidence needed to accelerate deployment of virtualized Oracle 11gR2.
EMC backup and recovery solutions are optimized for virtualized application
environments, by reducing backup times by 90% and increasing recovery speeds by
30x – even offering instant VM access - for worry-free protection. EMC backup
systems add another layer of assurance with end-to-end verification and self-healing
to ensure successful recoveries. EMC backup and recovery solutions accelerate a
VSPEX deployment and time to value.
Figure 1. EMC backup and recovery solutions covered in this Guide include
EMC Avamar deduplication software and system and EMC Data Domain
deduplication storage system.
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Scope
This Solution Guide describes how to design, implement, and size backup and
recovery for VSPEX Proven Infrastructure for Virtualized Oracle environments by using
the following configurations:
•
EMC Avamar to protect Oracle 11gR2 that runs within VMware.
•
EMC Avamar and EMC Data Domain to protect Oracle 11gR2 that runs within
VMware vSphere.
Essential reading
EMC recommends that you read the following documents, available on EMC.com and
the Powerlink website.
Solution
Overviews
Review the following VSPEX Solution Overview documents:
•
EMC VSPEX Proven Infrastructure for Virtualized Oracle
Review the following VSPEX Design and Implementation Guides:
Implementation
and Design Guides
• Design Guide: EMC VSPEX for Virtualized Oracle Database 11g OLTP
for Oracle
• Implementation Guide: EMC VSPEX for Virtualized Oracle Database
11gOLTP
VSPEX Proven
Infrastructure
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Review the following VSPEX Proven Infrastructures:
•
EMC VSPEX Private Cloud for VMware vSphere 5.1 for up to 500 Virtual
Machines
•
EMC VSPEX Private Cloud VMware vSphere 5.1 for up to 1000 Virtual
Machines
Design And Implementation Guide: VSPEX with EMC Backup and Recovery for
Virtualized Oracle 11gR2
Chapter 2: Solution overview and sizing
This chapter provides an overview of the VSPEX Proven Infrastructure for virtualized
Oracle, the backup and recovery products used in this solution, and critical guidance
about backup and recovery solution sizing.
Solution architecture
Figure 2 illustrates the architecture that characterizes a validated VSPEX Proven
Infrastructure, which supports Oracle 11gR2.
In this example:
•
An Oracle RAC environment is deployed as virtual machines on a vSphere
cluster.
•
A VNX model that has been validated as part of the VSPEX Proven
Infrastructure is used to provide the back-end storage functionality.
•
The Oracle virtual machine boot volumes are stored in virtual machine data
file (VMDK) format on NFS data stores.
•
Oracle database and log volumes are stored in RDM format on iSCSI native
disks.
•
EMC Avamar and EMC Data Domain that has been validated as part of
VSPEX Proven Infrastructure provides the backup and recovery
functionality.
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Figure 2. Solution architecture that includes VSPEX Proven Infrastructure
for virtualized Oracle 11gR2 and the supporting infrastructure
components.
Essential reading provides more information.
Oracle 11gR2 Overview
Oracle 11gR2 is an enterprise database management system that enables
businesses and customers to collaborate and share information. EMC enhances
Oracle 11gR2 with a selection of storage platforms, software, and services.
With Oracle 11gR2, Oracle continues to consolidate its approach to high availability
(HA) and disaster recovery (DR) by introducing features such as Flashback database
recovery and the ability to crosscheck RMAN-based backups. With an Oracle Real
Application Clusters (RAC) configuration, you can:
•
Conduct a backup or recovery by using the Flashback Recovery Area.
•
Crosscheck any RMAN backup manually or as part of a scheduled event.
•
Leverage optional RMAN scripts provided by Avamar for backup and
recovery.
An Oracle environment includes the following components:
•
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RMAN: A backup and recovery manager supplied for Oracle databases that
provides database backup, restore, and recovery capabilities. All RMAN
references in this document apply to the use of commands run from the
command line.
Design And Implementation Guide: VSPEX with EMC Backup and Recovery for
Virtualized Oracle 11gR2
•
Flash Recovery Area (FRA): A storage area that allows Flash Backup and
Recovery operations on Oracle databases. You can configure FRA on
an ASM diskgroup or on a local disk.
•
Flashback: A set of tools that allow an Oracle DBA (and other users with the
correct role-based access controls) to view and manipulate the past states
of data in an instance without the need to recover the data to a fixed pointin-time, in a destructive manner.
•
Datafile: Contains the data of an Oracle database.
•
Tablespace: Logical storage unit of datafiles.
•
Redo Logs: Files that log a history of all changes made to a database. These
files consist of redo records or redo entries that enable an Oracle DBA to
perform a point-in-time rollback. The redo log files allow you to perform
granular rollbacks, for example a single block of data that has changed in
the database.
•
Archived Redo Logs: A copy of the redo logs that augment backup and
recovery operations. Also known as archive-logs or archlogs.
•
Automatic Storage Management (ASM): An optional provisioning of storage
that enables the Oracle DBA to manager database datafiles, controlfiles,
and logfiles. With this feature, a DBA can control volumes and disks by
using Oracle SQL statements.
•
Control Files: Binary files required for database startup. Control files have a
persistent record of the physical structure of a database and contain the
names and locations of all redo log files, current system change numbers
(SCNs), etc.
These objects, tools, and features are the essential components in every Oracle
environment.
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Backup and Recovery Overview
This section provides backup and recovery options, as well as recommended backup
and recovery configurations and sizing for the EMC VSPEX for Virtualized Oracle
11gR2 solution.
EMC Avamar
Deduplication
Backup Software
and System
EMC Avamar provides fast, efficient backup and recovery through a complete
software and hardware solution. Equipped with integrated variable-length
deduplication technology, Avamar facilitates fast, daily full backups for virtual
environments, remote offices, enterprise applications, network-attached storage
(NAS) servers, and desktops/laptops.
The Avamar plug-in for Oracle supports backup and recovery operations of Oracle
database data that ranges from entire databases to various object levels, such as
tablespaces point-in-time recoveries and datafile restores. The plug-in also includes
the ability to restore data in-place to the same Oracle server or to perform a redirected
restore to another Oracle Server.
When you use Avamar Virtual Machine Image Protection to protect a virtual machine,
you can restore the virtual machine without installing the Avamar client on the
destination host.
The Avamar plug-in for Oracle performs the database backup but relies on the base
Avamar Windows Client. For disaster-level recovery, recover the operating system
(OS) from a virtual machine image recovery by using the Avamar Windows Client.
After the OS-level recovery completes, use the Avamar plug-in to recover the Oracle
databases.
Note: The implementation of VMware image-level protection is beyond the scope of
this guide, but you can use this option to recovery the base operating system.
EMC Data Domain
Deduplication
Storage System
EMC Data Domain deduplication storage systems continue to revolutionize disk
backup, archiving, and disaster recovery with high-speed, inline deduplication for
backup and archive workloads
You can use Data Domain systems as the backup target for Avamar. Install the
Avamar client and plug-ins in the same way as when you use an Avamar device as the
backup target. If you use a Data Domain system as the backup target for Avamar, then
after the Data Domain system has been discovered within the Avamar Manager
Software application, specify the backup target by checking the appropriate box in
the Avamar data set definition interface.
Backup and Recovery
Sizing
This section provides an overview of backup and recovery options and recommended
configurations for the VSPEX for Virtualized Oracle 11gR2 solution.
Table 1 represents a possible sizing for this Solution based on assumptions
contained within the Design Guide: EMC VSPEX for Virtualized Oracle:
Sizing can vary significantly depending on initial and day-over-day commonalities,
application change rates, retention periods that are required for the business.
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Design And Implementation Guide: VSPEX with EMC Backup and Recovery for
Virtualized Oracle 11gR2
For example, based on assumptions within the Design Guide: EMC VSPEX for
Virtualized Oracle:
•
If a configuration uses a retention period of 30 days for 300 VMs, then you
can use a Data Domain DD2500.
•
If a configuration uses a retention period of 3 years for 300 VMs, then use a
Data Domain DD4200.
Always use the BRS Sizing tool to provide formal sizing metrics for an environment.
The remainder of this document focuses on design and implementation for Avamar
deployments and Avamar and Data Domain deployments for VSPEX for Virtualized
Oracle 11gR2.
300VM
600VM
1000VM
VMware vSphere
Avamar 7.0
Avamar Data Store
Avamar 7.0
Avamar Data Store
Avamar 7.0
Avamar Data Store
Data Domain DD2500
Data Domain DD2500
Data Domain DD4200
Table 1. Recommended configurations for EMC Backup and Recovery solutions
for VSPEX for Virtualized Oracle deployments.
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Chapter 3: Oracle backup and recovery
considerations
This section provides more information about how to decrease backup times by using
multistreaming and incremental backups.
Multistreaming backups
Avamar Multistreaming enables up to 10 parallel streams for each backup.
Multistreaming improves backup performance when you store backup data on the
Avamar server or on a Data Domain system. The Avamar 7.0 for Oracle User Guide
provides more information about how to select the maximum number of streams for a
backup.
Before you configure Multistreaming, be aware that multistreaming places additional
demands on computer hardware and resources beyond the base requirements for the
Avamar plug-in for Oracle. The Avamar 7.0 for Oracle User Guide provides detailed
guidance on how to create prefix caching to account for each of the possible 10
streams.
Incremental backups
In most environments the administrator configures daily full backups. In larger scale
environments, the length of time to complete a backup might exceed the available
backup window.
The backup completion time might exceed the available backup window for one or
more of the following reasons:
•
Databases are too large to complete in the required time.
•
The available server resources are insufficient for the size of the server,
resulting in a slower backup. The change rate or growth of the redo logs
negatively impact Oracle performance and/or available capacity.
Avamar provides features that enable you to back up the Oracle data incrementally
and complete the backup within the available backup window.
When you configure an incremental backup schedule, EMC recommends that you
configure as many full backups as possible. To minimize the frequency of
incremental backups, identify the reason that the backup time exceeds the backup
window, then adjust the backup configuration.
When the number of databases or the sizes of the databases are too large to allow
you to run concurrent backups within the backup window, you can create a schedule
that minimally incorporates incremental backups.
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Design And Implementation Guide: VSPEX with EMC Backup and Recovery for
Virtualized Oracle 11gR2
For example:
1.
Create two backup groups, group1 and group2 that each contains half the
databases.
2.
Schedule group1 to perform an incremental backup and schedule group2 to
perform a full backup every second day.
3.
Schedule group2 to perform an incremental backup and schedule group1 to
perform a full backup on alternate days.
Configuring a full database backup every two days has the following benefits:
•
•
Greatly reduces the need to restore from an incremental backup. For
example, you only need to perform an incremental restore when:
−
A major failure occurs.
−
The last backup was the incremental backup.
−
You need to restore the full database.
Enables you to recover data from a Full backup. After you recover the
database, you can recover the filegroup.
Note: Frequent recoveries from incremental backups are unlikely except in very
large Oracle environments.
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Chapter 4: Configuring Oracle Backups
This section provides an overview of backup strategies when you use Avamar or an
Avamar plus Data Domain system, to back up Oracle.
Avamar backup strategies overview
An Oracle database consists of a collection of datafiles (.dbf), control files, and redo
log (.log) files located on a disk. Each database is associated with at least one
database instance. An Oracle instance can contains one or more Oracle databases
(.dbf) files. The .dbf is the main data file and has redo log (.log) files when the
database is in archivelog mode. Oracle commits the operations in the log files to
datafiles by using an ordered System Change Number (SCN). The datafiles reside in
tablespaces.
The backup strategy for an Oracle environment can include the following:
•
Oracle instance (all .dbf database files for that instance plus necessary
system database files)
•
Companion redo log files for each database (.dbf) file in archivelog mode
•
Selected tablespaces
•
Selected datafiles
The backup strategy for an Oracle environment should include Stand-alone
databases and RAC Databases.
On-demand
backups in a
stand-alone
environment
When you perform an on-demand backup in a stand-alone environment, you can back
up the entire Oracle instance, selected Oracle databases, and/or datafiles.
A stand-alone or non-RAC Oracle environment uses a group of shared memory areas
called System Global Area (SGA) to access to a single instance. The instance contains
a collection of Oracle-related memory and operating system processes that run on the
Oracle server.
Figure 3 illustrates the backup workflow for a stand-alone Oracle environment.
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Design And Implementation Guide: VSPEX with EMC Backup and Recovery for
Virtualized Oracle 11gR2
Figure 3. Oracle stand-alone configuration.
On-demand
backups in a highavailability
environment
An Oracle RAC is a configuration where multiple servers can run the Oracle Relational
Database Manager System (RDBMS) software and concurrently access a single
database.
The Avamar plug-in for Oracle can back up tablespaces, databases, and datafiles
from any machine in the RAC. EMC recommends that you back up a designated active
node by using RMAN commands and command set extensions that select either an
Avamar or Data Domain system as the backup target.
Avamar supports Flashback database recovery when you configure the database in
archivelog mode and use a pre-configured Flash Recovery Area (FRA). With RAC,
ensure that the FRA resides on a clustered file system or in Automated Storage
Management (ASM)–provisioned storage.
Oracle databases can grow to become Very Large Databases (VLDB). A VLDB contains
an extremely high number of database rows or occupies an extremely large amount of
physical file system storage space. A robust network transport layer is critical.
To back up VLDBs, EMC recommends that you use:
•
VMware VMXNET Gen 3 (VMXNET3) paravirtualized virtual network, at 10
GbE.
15
•
VLAN to separate the backup data network from the Oracle production
transaction-based network. This configuration ensures optimal delivery of
backup and recovery operations.
EMC recommends that you optimize the following RMAN parameters for standard
backup and for deduplicated backups that use both Avamar and Data Domain
systems:
•
Disable database encryption for deduplicated backups. This ensures that
backups will use the best data deduplication ratios.
•
Use up to 10 backup channel (stream) allocations. EMC recommends that
you increment the number of streams one at a time, then monitor backup
throughput for diminishing returns in the form of timeouts or other delays.
For example, in some Oracle ecosystems (infrastructure and application
behavior), you could observe that 8 streams is the optimal stream number.
•
Set the FILESPERSET=1 and MAXOPENFILES=1 parameters in the RMAN
configuration files when you use a Data Domain system as a target. Any
number higher mutates the stream in the same manner as encryption, and
reduces the data Deduplication ratio.
Backups of Oracle RAC environments
To back up the active node in an Oracle RAC environment by using the Avamar client
to leverage RMAN, you must create an Avamar client resource cluster. The Oracle
Administrator can continue to add databases to the active node based on business
importance or other critical criteria.
The Oracle DBA chooses whether to configure the Avamar or Data Domain dataset in
the Avamar Admin GUI. After the DBA configures the dataset, Avamar stores the full
backup for a client and all subsequent incremental backups on the originally selected
device in the dataset. The Avamar Plug-in for Oracle does not support backups stored
partly on Avamar and partly on Data Domain systems. Regardless of the dataset used
for data backups, the Avamar backup software stores the backup metadata on the
Avamar server.
To configure the Avamar Oracle Backup by using RMAN, perform the following highlevel steps:
1.
Install the Avamar file system client on each RAC node in the cluster.
2.
Install the Avamar plug-in for Oracle on the each node in the RAC cluster.
EMC Avamar 7.0 for Oracle User Guide describes how to install both the
client and plug-in on each physical node in a RAC environment.
3.
Ensure that the rac_config script runs on each RAC node and that you
specify the same shared Avamar var directory for each node that you
configure. The EMC Avamar 7.0 for Oracle User Guide provides step-by-step
instructions.
4.
Register the Avamar client.
Figure 4 illustrates an example of an Oracle environment where the
avagent/avtar/avagent for Avamar uses the Media Management Library (MML)
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Design And Implementation Guide: VSPEX with EMC Backup and Recovery for
Virtualized Oracle 11gR2
provided by Oracle to initiate an RMAN command that requests a backup of the
database, or other lower level objects.
In this example, the RMAN command:
•
Starts and requests from Oracle a list of backup objects by using a Recovery
Catalog, or control files.
•
Specifies the expiration period of the backup.
•
Specifies the maxopenfiles and filesperset parameters that can impact
deduplicated backup.
Figure 4. Backup workflow for Oracle 11gR2
Avamar with Data Domain backup strategies overview
Avamar 7.0 and later versions support Oracle database and log file backups to a Data
Domain system. Avamar 6.0.x supported database backups to a Data Domain system
only. Although beyond the scope of this paper, this change in support changes the
previous paradigm for Avamar/Data Domain sizing because the log files, around 1
MB in size, can now result in different Avamar/Data Domain ratios.
Avamar 7.0 and later has the following advantages:
•
You can deploy more, smaller sized Avamar grids, which can hold most or
all of the Oracle databases.
•
You can co-locate database and logs on the same devices/media as part of
a unified recovery operation with all backup metadata residing on the
Avamar server.
17
Chapter 5: Solution Validation Methodologies
This section provides guidance and the steps required to validate bakup and recovery
operations that use the EMC Avamar deduplication software.
Validating backup
and recovery
Validation of the Oracle backup and recovery implementation requires a number of
recovery operations. The highest recovery level recovers an entire Oracle database.
You can recover the database into the original instance or to an alternate instance, if
the RMAN version supports the redirected restore task. The Avamar Oracle agent can
also perform lower level object recoveries such as a tablespace point-in-time recovery
and a datafile restore.
The following core Avamar Oracle documents outline the specific steps required to
recover lower level objects:
18
•
EMC Avamar 7.0 for Oracle User Guide
•
EMC Avamar 7.0 Operational Best Practices
•
EMC Avamar 7.0 Administration Guide
Design And Implementation Guide: VSPEX with EMC Backup and Recovery for
Virtualized Oracle 11gR2
Chapter 6: Reference Documentation
This section summarizes the documentation to review for more information about
EMC Avamar, Oracle 11gR2, and VMware vSphere.
Product documentation
The following documents, available from the EMC Online Support website, provide
additional and relevant information. If you do not have access to a document, contact
your EMC representative.
•
EMC Avamar 7.0 for Oracle User Guide
•
EMC Avamar 7.0 Operational Best Practices
•
EMC Avamar 7.0 Administration Guide
•
EMC Avamar 7.0 for VMware User Guide
EMC Data Domain Deduplication Storage System
•
Deploy a Highly Available Virtual Machine
•
Network Load Balancing Deployment Guide
Note: The links provided were working correctly at the time of publication.
Other documentation
The Oracle website provides documentation on Oracle 11gR2: http://www.oracle.com
The VMware website provides documentation on VMware vSphere and vCenter:
http://www.vmware.com
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