Veritas-bu

Re: [Veritas-bu] New Installation: 6.0 MP4 or 6.5 MPx ?

2007-12-19 11:46:00
Subject: Re: [Veritas-bu] New Installation: 6.0 MP4 or 6.5 MPx ?
From: "Ed Wilts" <ewilts AT ewilts DOT org>
To: "Jeff Cleverley" <jeff.cleverley AT avagotech DOT com>
Date: Wed, 19 Dec 2007 10:28:07 -0600
We have a great relationship with NetBackup support folks and engineers.  Much of this was built on the fact that when we upgraded from 5.1 to 6.0MP3 we had a disaster on our hands.  We're currently at 6.0MP5 today and relatively stable.  We have conversations with them multiple times per week and they've been at our site a few times (their offices are only a few miles up the road).  We're not a small site although we're far from their biggest customer and we have enough complexities thrown in regularly that make the engineers earn their pay.

If I was starting fresh today, I'd go straight to 6.5.1.  In fact, this is what we're going to on January 1, and we're basing this on our discussions with Symantec and what they know about our environment and their product (they obviously know about bugs that we don't since they may never have been seen by a customer even though they're present in the code base).  This decision was not taken lightly, and the Symantec folks know they'll be onsite again if NBU doesn't perform as advertised.

One of your requirements is a large RHEL environment so remember that NBU 6.5 is the *first* release to support ACLs on RHEL and also the *first* to support FlashBackup on Linux.  The SAN Media Server license doesn't exist with 6.5 - it's now the Enterprise Client license and includes both the SAN Media Server and FlashBackup functionality.  Since you're licensing this piece anyway, you may as well see if FlashBackups will speed up your backups.

BTW, Aptare reporting would not have been an issue even if you had it installed - they support 6.5 today (and have for quite a while).

Something to think about...
   .../Ed

On 12/18/07, Jeff Cleverley <jeff.cleverley AT avagotech DOT com> wrote:
Greetings,

I'm coming into an unique opportunity with regards to NetBackup.  I'm
going to get to start from scratch.  No upgrades, imports, migrations,
etc.   This environment is currently running NB5.0 and I also manage a
5.1 backing up 70 TB of SAN storage.  We want to stay with NetBackup and
not switch to another vendor.

The old environment we inherited is old (hardware and software), been
managed by at least 4 different groups of administrators and
transitioned between at least 2 companies.  We know the database is not
clean.  We've decided we are going to set up everything new and when
everything on the old one expires, we're going to just shut it all off :-)

I've seen a number of threads about which versions to go to (6.0 MP4 vs
6.5 seemed the most common).  Almost all of these dealt with upgrades.
I don't want to start any of the which is better threads but would like
to see what people would choose if they had the start from scratch
option.  From what I'm seeing, I'm leaning towards 6.0 MP4.

Below is what we are going to be using and backing up:

Master server - Dell 2950 RHEL4 (final details like release level still
pending).
Current SAN media servers - hpux 11.00 (L3000 x 2) and 1 hpux 11.11
(rp3440), all fibre attached to the tape library.
Network clients - 1 RH3 client.
Tape library - Dell MS6000 with 4 fibre Gen 3 Ultrium drives.
SAN switches - Brocade 4100 x 2 ( We will also run the EMC SAN
connections through the switches).

The plan is to start replacing the hpux servers with Dell servers.  They
will also do SAN backups.  Everything else listed above will be new.
There will be ~ 20 TB of SAN based data on the 4 servers.  Licensing may
be an issue as it seems to have changed.  We currently have tier 1 hpux
licenses for the master and SAN media servers, along with some unix
network client licenses.  We're trying to figure out the tier changes
but I can't get my hands on a licensing guide.  We have enough drive and
SSO licenses for the new library.

We don't do any database backups like Oracle, no Windows at all, no
vaulting or remote replication, and don't currently have any reporting
software like Aptare to deal with the latest revisions.  It sounds so
easy and simple it scares me :-)

Thanks,

Jeff

--

Jeff Cleverley
Unix Systems Administrator
4380 Ziegler Road
Fort Collins, Colorado 80525
970-288-4611
jeff.cleverley AT avagotech DOT com

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--
Ed Wilts, Mounds View, MN, USA
mailto:ewilts AT ewilts DOT org
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