> 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!

You can use / as the file list and choose "Cross Mount Points".

Then, for your machines with clustered applications, create and
exclude list (policy specific) on each client to exclude the shared
filesystems.

> 
> 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

bpmedialist, available_media, or vmquery (look for "Time Assigned"
value) would all do the trick.  See also bpimagelist -media if you
want to know media used in the last N hours or something.

> 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)!

As of NBU 4.5 FP3, tapes which were pulled from the scratch pool will
be returned to the scratch pool automatically (by default, you can
disable this if you like -- see "RETURN* in the MM SAG index).


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




-- 
Larry Kingery 
    Eagles may soar, but weasels don't get sucked into jet engines