Kevin,

We’ve just done precisely this for 2 of the environments we look after…

(windows 2003 32bit master/media to windows 2008 x64 master/media via catalog recovery)

I say ‘we’, but beyond writing out the steps for the build guys, I didn’t even have to get involved. So that’s a good pointer to how painless it was J

Cheers,

Nic

Hi Justin,

Thanks for the response.

I’ve a test master server set up and I’m just waiting for the server to be rebuilt with 2008 now to test but just wanted to throw it out there in case there are issues I don’t experience in my testing.

We install Netbackup in a specific location as standard on client, media etc so we should be okay for that.

As far as the latest version, 7.0.1 is the latest in 7.0.x so we should be okay, we have 7.1 but haven’t ventured that way just yet, we were late to the 7.0 party so we’re still moving our 6.5 servers over.

Large infrastructure with a lot of servers and server owners reluctant to had over servers for upgrades easily so it’s a slow process from upgrading the master to getting all other servers on the same version.

Part of the plan on the production servers is to rename the master and power it down so it doesn’t interfere with the new server and we can always bring it back up if the migration fails.

Hi Kevin,

I’ve done this with UNIX (Solaris and Linux) many times without any issues.

Confirm with someone on the list or NBU support there won’t be any issues from Win/32 -> Win/64 (catalog format/etc), you can also do a test restore to a machine on a separate network with the same _hostname_ to test the procedure.

There is 1 gotcha (at least in UNIX) when you perform the catalog recovery, ensure the place you installed NetBackup is the same as it was before, if you installed netbackup (example) to /opt/openv but then install it to say /home/openv when you perform the catalog recovery, it will fail unexpectedly.

Symantec also recommends you are on the latest version ‘best practice’ before moving forward with any upgrade/etc.  With 7.0.1 still(?) should be the latest for the 7.0.x series.

Things you can try:

1)      Try dry-run to box w/same hostname on separate network.

2)      When doing it for real, REMOVE the old box from the network, attempt recovery on new box, if it fails/etc then you can plug-in the old box and continue processing backup jobs.

Justin.

Morning All,

We’re in the process of migrating our Master Servers to new hardware and a new OS.

We’re running Netbackup 7.0.1 on Windows 2003 x32 but need to change to new hardware witch has been built with Windows 2008 R2 x64.

We have a cutover plan so we keep the server name and IP address the same on the new 2008 box so in the end the master server will look the same but just on new hardware and on Windows 2008 R2 x64.

So the question is, if we take a catalog backup of the existing master can we use it to rebuild the master server once the server is up with the same IP, name and Netbackup 7.0.1 x64 installed ?

More importantly are there any down sides to this method or gotcha’s?

Regards

Kevin

Kevin O’Connor | Storage Administrator, Technology Solutions | ESB Business Service Centre | www.esb.ie