Veritas-bu

Re: [Veritas-bu] VSP in 6.x

2007-10-29 13:46:59
Subject: Re: [Veritas-bu] VSP in 6.x
From: "Rosenkoetter, Gabriel" <Gabriel.Rosenkoetter AT radian DOT biz>
To: VERITAS-BU AT mailman.eng.auburn DOT edu
Date: Mon, 29 Oct 2007 13:27:47 -0400
That idea works very well if your Windows clients are all running Win2k3.
 
If they're still running Win2k, though, you must use VSP (or simply accept not having WOFB).
 
Though there are a variety of pieces of software that can cause the VSP file lockups, I see it most frequently with Symantec Anti-Virus, the irony of which is pretty rich. There is no good way to exclude VSP files from SAV (you can exclude a directory and everything under it or a file extension across all file systems, but you can not specify a proper file glob to exclude) nor any way to force NetBackup to put its VSP files in a specific path reliably (if it runs out of space, it'll fall back to the root of drive letters starting from C:).
 
But, back to Rusty's original question: no change to NetBackup can fix this problem. The problem is that NetBackup closes out a backup (especially by failure) and attempts to immediately remove its VSP files, but that fails because another application running with administrative privileges (SAV, for the purposes of this example) still has a file handle open (because it's doing active scanning of all writes on the host, and it's not done processing the last chunk of snapshot NetBackup copied into the VSP file), but NetBackup doesn't wait long enough, it just gives up and quits. The fix needs to come from the SAV side, to make it possible to exclude paths with a proper file glob (or, preferably, a full on RE). I'd note that NetBackup does already support exclusions by file glob... ;^>

--
gabriel rosenkoetter
Radian Group Inc, Unix/Linux/VMware Sysadmin / Backup & Recovery
gabriel.rosenkoetter AT radian DOT biz, 215 231 1556

 


From: Ed Wilts [mailto:ewilts AT ewilts DOT org]
Sent: Monday, October 29, 2007 12:53 PM
To: Major, Rusty
Cc: VERITAS-BU AT mailman.eng.auburn DOT edu
Subject: Re: [Veritas-bu] VSP in 6.x

Use VSS, not VSP and you won't have the issues in 6.0.  We've instructed our Windows admins to always do a custom install and disable the VSS installation and let Windows do the snapshots.  No more cache files.

Now getting the Windows admins to actually follow the installation instructions and do a custom install - that's a challenge all by itself.  Whenever they complain to us (Storage) about a large cache file, we tell them to read the install docs and get it right this time.

   .../Ed

On 10/29/07, Major, Rusty <RMajor AT vericenter DOT com> wrote:
Has NBU 6.0 or 6.5 fixed the issue with the VSP Cache file becoming locked and not cleaning up after itself? This remains a common problem for me in 5.1 so we try not to use it.
 
Thanks,
 
Rusty Major, MCSE, BCFP
Sr. Data Assurance Engineer
(281) 584-4693
VeriCenter, Inc.
 



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