Re: [Veritas-bu] Lets hear about your upgrade experience! 5.x

Hello Ed

I am basing this comment (as you detailed below) on a discussion with Symantec. that is not to say its right, but I know after the huge cock-ups there were with 6.x one of their focus points was an easier transition from 5.x to 6.5 or 6.5.1

Of course, alot would depend on the environment, and also the stability of that environment. I guess one small fault can cause an endless amount of headaches and quite possible downtime for your NetBackup environment.

Having Symantec on the end of the phone could be a good thing.... depending on their expertise me thinks.

In regards to the second comment (see below in blue), I did respond to this in another thread of the same subject line.

Hopefully this is clear.

Thanks, Simon

From: Ed Wilts [mailto:ewilts AT ewilts DOT org]
Sent: Wednesday, March 12, 2008 4:56 PM
To: WEAVER, Simon (external)
Cc: Jeff Lightner; Tony T.; veritas-bu AT mailman.eng.auburn DOT edu
Subject: Re: [Veritas-bu] Lets hear about your upgrade experience! 5.x - 6.5

On Wed, Mar 12, 2008 at 10:33 AM, WEAVER, Simon (external) <simon.weaver AT astrium.eads DOT net> wrote:

> it seems that going from 5.1 to 6.5 or even 6.5.1 should be the easier upgrade path.

What are you basing this on? The 6.0 to 6.5 upgrade has been relatively painless for everybody. It's always been the 5.x to 6.0 upgrade that has been the issue and the steps to do that are in the 5.1 to 6.5 path - you can't avoid the migration by skipping 6.0.

In general, the uglier the source environment in 5.1, the uglier the migration, and it hasn't always been the admin's fault (although sometimes it has been). Some things worked in earlier releases but were never really documented or supported and NetBackup is not unique in this. The more complex the product is, the uglier upgrades are going to be since there are too many input permutations to even consider testing. There are lots of environments out there where Symantec just says "we didn't know anybody was even doing *that*" or "we didn't even know you *could* do that".

If the source environment would have been bugfree since it was installed, it would be easier, but it wasn't - all releases that I've worked on, going back to 3.4 had some set of bugs that would leave the system in weird and wonderful states. That makes the upgrade even harder since they can't just trust that the source system was pristine. It also doesn't help that sometimes the upgrade processes themselves have bugs.

> maybe careful planning is the key?

Careful planning is always key but this alone doesn't guarantee a successful outcome. Part of the planning, however, should include a fall back plan...

.../Ed
--
Ed Wilts, Mounds View, MN, USA
mailto:ewilts AT ewilts DOT org

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