Veritas-bu

Re: [Veritas-bu] Special Tapes to policies

2009-02-27 10:13:12
Subject: Re: [Veritas-bu] Special Tapes to policies
From: Ed Wilts <ewilts AT ewilts DOT org>
To: Peter Mosopa <Peter.Mosopa AT multichoice.co DOT za>
Date: Fri, 27 Feb 2009 08:53:19 -0600
On Fri, Feb 27, 2009 at 4:51 AM, Peter Mosopa <Peter.Mosopa AT multichoice.co DOT za> wrote:
You can create different volume pools and specify a certain pool to use
for a particular backup. In our scenario, I've got barcodes that starts
with NTXXXX and UNXXXX respectively, all my windows servers I backup to
the NT pool and all my Unix/Oracle backups I use the UN pool.

Do you not allow your Unix and Windows admins to have lunch together either?  :-)

Try this, it makes life very easy especially when you've got different
retention periods on your windows and unix servers respectively.

By default, NetBackup won't mix retention periods on the same tapes anyway.  Putting the Unix and Windows backups into separate pools simply increases the likelihood of status 96 errors when you have free tapes in one pool but are out of tapes in another.   An incremental that would succeed writing to the end of a tape will now fail because NetBackup was told it wasn't allowed to do that.

What you CAN do and what you SHOULD do are two very different things.  There are a lot of ways you CAN configure NetBackup and some of them are even good ways.  There are a lot of other ways you can configure it that makes the developers go "why would they possibly do that?".

The first thing you need to define is the BUSINESS problem you're trying to solve.  Not the TECHNICAL problem but the BUSINESS problem.   Putting Unix and Windows backups on separate physical media rarely solves a BUSINESS problem.  There may be a few cases out there where this is actually required, but those are few are far between.  Once you've defined the BUSINESS problem, then implement the TECHNICAL solution.  I'm guessing that the business problem is more along the lines of "back up everything every day and keep the backups for x days" than it is "don't pollute the Windows tapes with Unix data".

Don't overmanage NetBackup.  Keep things as simple as you possibly can and you'll be more successful in the long term.  New admins or support folks will have an easier time of trying to figuring out how you're configured and why it's done that way.  The less complicated your environment is, the less likely you'll be bitten by bugs within the product too.
.../Ed

Ed Wilts, RHCE, BCFP, BCSD, SCSP, SCSE
ewilts AT ewilts DOT org
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