[Veritas-bu] My First 6.5 Upgrade Experience

Upgraded my first environment over the last two days. For the most part, it was pretty painless, but there were a couple of issues we ran into.

First, overview of the environment:
Solaris Master 5.1MP3
2 Windows Media 5.1MP3
4 Windows SAN Media (2 were 5.1MP3 and 2 were 5.0GA)
ADIC i2000 8 LTO3 drives

I spent a couple weeks reading the Upgrade, Install, and Admin Guides and doing ALL of the various checks of all the systems. I HIGHLY HIGHLY HIGHLY recommend that for ANY 6.x upgrade that EVERY SINGLE STEP in the upgrade checklist be followed/investigated. The first issue I ran into was transferring many gigs of data to the servers as I am remote to the site. The next time I do this, I'm copying them and mailing them to the site before hand! NBCC was, surprisingly, pretty clean, so I didn't have to spend much time with that. I do like the improvements they have made in this area over the last couple of years. After that I had the support rep do a pre-upgrade WebEx session. At Symantec Forum, the Engineers talking about the upgrade actually recommend doing the WebEx, so if the engineer balks on it, continue to request it. In my WebEx, it actually turned out that I had missed two Media servers that were not at the required patch level. Don't know how I missed them, but I had to patch them before upgrading those two.

I upgraded the Master and two Media Servers I manage directly without any issue. I was actually surprised at how quickly and easily it upgraded. Much to my chagrin, though, the next server I tried failed on nbpushdata -add because of communication problems. I did not understand this as 5.1 had worked just fine and I had performed all of the network communication verifications in the checklist. It turns out that PBX does additional communication and the Media server was not aware of the Master server's alias. This will be a problem for anyone who has multiple interfaces and subnets setup. Right now there is no way to verify how PBX communicates, so Engineering is looking into this and hopefully something will come out of it.

After the upgrade, I noticed the max number of copies was reset to 2, which caused some problems with duplications. It also appears that it is trying to duplicate all images off of the DSSUs again. I haven't had much time to look into this, yet. Oh, there is also an issue where the Windows Java Client wants to cache data from every client in Host Properties. Anytime I clicked on that, it would lock up the java client. There is a fix to turn off this 'functionality', but I found it ridiculous that the Engineers would want to have the java client do this by default.

Things I took away from this upgrade that I offer as advice to anyone doing an upgrade:
-Run the NBCC check.
-Perform ALL of the upgrade steps - they are there for a reason!!
-Keep your case open with Veritas until the upgrade is done.
-Run the NBCC check.
-If you are not comfortable with the upgrade steps, hire a consultant with experience!
-Run the NBCC check.
-If you are not local, save yourself time and burn the media and send to the site.
-Run the...well you get the idea.
-Verify you have root/admin access to EVERY Master/Media server.
-If you can, talk the support rep into a pre-upgrade WebEx session for a final go/no-go decision. Another pair of eyes is always goood.
-Note all your failures before you begin the upgrade, that way you aren't troubleshooting something that was failing before the upgrade.

This is one of the smaller environments I support and I'm glad I started with this one. Overall, the upgrade was pretty smooth. Once I got the Master and the two main media servers upgraded, I knew I was on the path out of the woods. Pretty much it boils down to RTFM. If you do that and follow instructions, you should be in pretty good shape.
That's all, good luck to anyone else.

Rusty Major, MCSE, BCFP
Sr. Data Assurance Engineer
(281) 584-4693
VeriCenter, Inc.

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