We’ve been having odd network issues over the years and I’d been thinking there might be some benefit in having media servers use faster interfaces the master server given that both are on a 10 GB VLAN that we use to push data to our deduplication appliances.   I’m wondering if anyone knows of the wisdom or folly in such an idea? 

 

I understand that what the media server and master are pushing between each other is control information rather than the actual backup data which of course goes from the media server to its defined storage units rather than the storage units on the master.    Again I was just thinking there might be other traffic on the main IP (1 GB VLAN) that might be interfering with this control information so thought having it go over the faster (and insulated) 10 GB VLAN might be beneficial.

 

DETAILS:

On building a new media server I attempted to do this and dutifully added the IP of the master’s 10 GB NIC as the host name in /etc/hosts on the client and also added the 10 GB NIC of the media server to the /etc/hosts on the master.   I also of course added the master’s name as SERVER=<master> to the media server’s bp.conf and vice-versa.  (Note I did this after initial software install on the media server so it presumably learned the host by its 1GB NIC IP at that point.)

 

On trying to run a backup from the Java GUI using the media server’s storage unit I got an error 811.

 

On reviewing a couple of tech notes at Symantec/Veritas I found that there is a known issue when the Master has multiple interfaces using different IPs.   The fix is to:

A)     Add the alternate IPs as entries to /etc/hosts on the media server.

B)      Add the alternate name to bp.conf on the media server as SERVER=<alternate name>.

C)      Bounce NetBackup including the PBX daemon on the media server.

 

On doing all that it eliminated the error and I can now backup the media server using the media server’s storage unit on initiating a job in the GUI (pointed to the master).

 

However in the PBX log I’m seeing that the initial connection seems to be made from the 1 GB NIC on the master and later traffic is using the 10 GB NIC on the master.   So it makes me wonder if there is any benefit in doing this at all or if I should just let the 1 GB VLAN NIC of the master in DNS be the one it uses as I have in past?

 

Note:  I did of course use bpclntcmd at the various stages to verify the master was seeing the expected IPs of the media server and vice-versa.  I also verified both sides could access each other over both interfaces on ports 1556 (pbx) and 13782 & 13724.

 

This is NetBackup 7.1   Both the master and the new media server are RHEL 6.x servers.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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