Need a little info from a windows person on cluster backups.

With 2003 if we did a cluster backup you did

Physical-1 - C:\ and System state

Physical-2 - C:\ and System State

Virtual-3 - All resources that belong to the virtual
And maybe a Virtual-4 and all of its resources.


Now with 2008 - while I was on PTO someone else put in a new clustered server for backups, but did not follow the above method.

Instead they did

Physical-1 - All Local Drives
Physical-2 - All Local Drives

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Now the part that surprised me is that
Physical-1 got all the Resources plus the C and SS

And Physical-2 just go the C and SS

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My question -
Is it still (for 2008 servers) correct to set up a clustered server backup getting both the physical and virtual server names.
Or does it work correctly just doing all local drives on the physical names?

What the new person did works but is wrong.  Your virtual resources are being backed up by physical1.  When the resources migrate to physical2, they'll automatically get full backups.  At restore time, you have to figure out which node the resources were on by searching the backups for both physical1 and physical2 and piecing together your restore recovery.

In addition, you should be seeing status 71 errors for the backups of the resources on physical2 because the disks are seen by bpmount but can't be backed up.

NetBackup makes no attempt to figure out what virtual servers have what resources.  It's why I continue to claim that NBU *tolerates* active/passive clusters but doesn't really *support* them.  The same holds true of Veritas clusters.

   .../Ed

Ed Wilts, RHCE, BCFP, BCSD, SCSP, SCSE
ewilts AT ewilts DOT org

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