Heathe,
Have you thought about "bonding" the nics of the media server(s)?  If your 
switches can handle lacp then you can 'bond' 2 nics and get twice the 
throughput.  As long as your other resources are not maxed out this can help 
out a lot.  We were missing windows all the time until we enabled this on each 
media server.

http://backdrift.org/howtonetworkbonding

We also set a specific media server to handle the backup instead of leaving the 
option at "Any Available".  All of our Storage Units are set to "On Demand Only"

Thank you, 

Joseph A. Infantino II
BackUp/Recovery Administrator
      


-----Original Message-----
From: veritas-bu-bounces AT mailman.eng.auburn DOT edu 
[mailto:veritas-bu-bounces AT mailman.eng.auburn DOT edu] On Behalf Of Heathe 
Yeakley
Sent: Tuesday, September 14, 2010 4:17 PM
To: NetBackup Mailing List
Subject: [Veritas-bu] Alternate Network Interfaces

My Fellow Admins,

I have a backup environment comprised of a single RHEL 5 Master server
(which doubles as a media server) and a single dedicated media server,
also running RHEL 5. These 2 servers are backing up a small
environment of approximately 100 servers with a combined weekly backup
volume of about 20 - 30 terabytes.

On each server, I only have 1 of the available 4 NICs configured. Each
morning I come in and a handful of my larger boxes are still running
and getting terrible throughput.

I've looked at CPU, memory and other statistics on the box, and it
doesn't look like I'm overloading my master and/or media server. I
think it's simply a case of my 1 NIC per box is getting saturated
during my backup window and each of my clients isn't getting a lot of
throughput to whichever machine is backing it up.

I have asked my network team to please run a second cable to the
second NIC on each box. I've brought both NICs online. I have selected
1 solaris 10 client in my backup environment that I want to try and
send all its backup traffic to the second interface on whichever box
ends up backing it up and night.

I've scanned through the NetBackup admin guide for Unix/Linux and I've
browsed the knowledgebase on Symantec's website for ideas on how to do
this. I've seend two or three ways to do it and I'm trying to figure
out which one best suits what I'm trying to do.

This first KB article I read is:
http://seer.entsupport.symantec.com/docs/316357.htm

which suggests going into Global attributes and setting "Use Specified
Network Interface" on the client. My question is, I have two different
interfaces I could potentially use: the 2nd NIC on my master or the
second NIC on my media server. This box implies I can only put in one
interface. Since it's a crap shoot which media server will get the
task of backing the machine up, I'm not sure if this is the option for
what I want to do.

Then I found this article:
http://seer.entsupport.symantec.com/docs/269879.htm

Which talks about the REQUIRED_INTERFACE directive in the
/usr/openv/volmgr/vm.conf file.But upon reading the technote, that
doesn't sound quite like what I'm trying to do.

Any ideas?

- Heathe Kyle Yeakley
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