Thanks to all who replied. To summarise:

The consensus is to have as few policies or volume pools as possible to make 
administration of Netbackup easier. Two possible solutions outlined for my 
environment were:

1. Add all UNIX servers into one policy or perhaps split them into two policies 
with different start/end times [thanks Steven]. 

2. Create multiple policies based on the speed and network performance of the 
servers and group them accordingly.

I have to say I am in favour of grouping the systems based on speed/network 
performance. In my environment we typically have the same hardware in the same 
network segment so I could create four or five policies based on hardware type 
i.e. E3000, V210, E250 etc and add servers accordingly. This will drop my 
current policies from thirty to around five - not bad going! [Thanks to Kate 
for this suggestion]

One other interesting suggestion was different policies if multiplexing is 
enabled or not. To be honest, I have yet to look at multiplexing. Is it worth 
using it for my backups? (I only have a single SDLT drive at the moment).

The other part of this question was specifying the file systems to backup. Some 
systems will have three file systems and others will have to (i.e. just / and 
/var) as these systems were partitioned in a different way. The recommendation 
was to use ALL_LOCAL_DRIVES. The question I have is that I have an A5000 with 
lots of file systems and would prefer to backup these independently but do not 
want to build an exclude list (as I will most likely forget to edit it when I 
add a new file system). What happens if I specify a file system like /usr in a 
policy but is not a separate file system but part of /? (hope I made myself 
clear). 

I guess what I could do is create a separate policy for the servers that are 
connected to the A5000 and manually specify the file systems to backup instead 
of using ALL_LOCAL_DRIVES (as all the other servers will need all the local 
file systems backed up).

Now for application backups. As I said previously, I have a number of file 
systems that will need to be backed up but on different schedules dependent on 
how frequently the file systems change. The other difficulty with this is that 
I use virtual IP addresses for each 'application' as they are in a four node 
cluster and use that interface to backup (as I never know where it is going to 
be on the cluster). What is the best way to define the policies?

While writing this, I am thinking that I could create two policies, one for 
daily backups and one for weekly backups and then define all four 'real' ip 
addresses for each server. I am making the assumption that it will only backup 
the file system that is mounted on one of the nodes but simply skip the file 
system on the other nodes as its not mounted. Would that work? How would I go 
about restoring the file system if I didn't know which server it came from?

The last part was the question about tape rotation. It would appear that 
Netbackup 5 automatically moves tapes to the scratch pool when they expire 
(hurray!). Now the question is how do I import and eject tapes for last nights 
backup? Does anyone have any good systems for automating this and labelling 
tapes etc so they can easily be found... (I admit I might only have sixty tapes 
but is still a big pain!)

Thanks for everyone who has replied and look forward to more responses.

Timothy.

PS: Kate, Is NB5 really that unstable?




-----Original Message-----
From: Timothy Arnold 
Sent: 23 February 2004 18:18
To: veritas-bu AT mailman.eng.auburn DOT edu
Subject: [Veritas-bu] Re-evaluating policies


Hi Netbackup Guru's!

I am about to embark on upgrading to Netbackup 5. I thought it might be a very 
good time to re-evaluate our policy configurations and see if there is anyway 
to improve the current system and make it more simple and easier to use. I 
would like to ask a few questions to see what you guru's think.

Our configuration is fairly simple. About thirty Unix clients connecting to an 
Sun L25. Four of the servers connect to a couple of A5000 arrays that host 
application data.

With this in mind each system will have its own schedule for system backups 
that run weekly and another schedule for application backups that run daily. We 
have virtual IP addresses for applications so I use the virtual IP in its own 
policy, so in affect I have three 'kinds' of policies.

So my first question is, can I consolidate the system backups into one policy? 
Is this recommended? The systems will always have / and /var but not always 
have /usr - will I need to split the policy dependent on which partitions I 
have? This would reduce the number of polices from thirty to one!

The other question is relating to tape rotation. In NB3.4 figuring out which 
tapes have been written to was a complete nightmare and I eventually wrote a 
shell script to automatically figure out which tapes had been used and emailed 
the operator which was fine, the only issue I had was that new tapes that have 
been used in a volume pool got put back into the same volume pool and was 
unavailable to the other pools unless you moved them using another script - 
seams like a little bit of a fudge to me! Does anyone know if tape rotation has 
been improved in NB5? If not, would anyone like to share any shell script with 
me (as I am sure they are better than my badly written shell scripts)!

I would appreciate any feedback and would be very interested to hear how other 
people have configured and maintained their Netbackup environment.

Thanks,

Timothy.



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