Re: [Veritas-bu] Converting stand-alone Master to clustered Master

It's been almost a year since I've had to deal with a clustered master server, so I may not remember some of the details, but in addition to knowing the virtual name of the cluster, NBU also knows the host names of every node in the cluster. How NBU dealt with a cluster changed in either 5.1 or 6.0 (I'm leaning toward 6.0 here). I once wanted to move a clustered master server to a new cluster by setting up the new cluster while the old one was still running, etc, etc, etc (tedious details omitted). I contacted Veritas support, and they said that even the hostnames of the nodes had to remain the same.

So, I'm guessing there's some major under-the-hood work that would have to be done to do that kind of conversion. Even EMM knows about the individual nodes in the cluster, and it keeps track of which node is the active node in the cluster. I'm guessing that even building a new cluster from scratch and then doing a catalog recovery wouldn't work because of this.
--
Jack Forester, Jr.
Senior Recovery Administrator
Global Technology Services - AHS
Mylan, Inc.
1000 Hampton Center
Morgantown, WV 26505

jack.forester AT mylan DOT com

Phone: +1.304.554.6039
Cell: +1.412.805.5313

"Donaldson, Mark" <Mark.Donaldson AT Staples DOT com>
Sent by: veritas-bu-bounces AT mailman.eng.auburn DOT edu

10/13/2009 05:19 PM

To	"Bryan Bahnmiller" <bbahnmiller AT dtcc DOT com>
cc	veritas-bu AT mailman.eng.auburn DOT edu
Subject	Re: [Veritas-bu] Converting stand-alone Master to clustered Master

The goal is to get off of the aging V880 and onto a cheaper Linux platform. At the same time, we've had a couple high-profile hardware failures in the past couple months and, since the hardware is cheap (and the VCS license is "free" thanks to our site license), putting in a cluster seems a way to add reliability for the cost of a $5000 x86 box.

I don't intend to rename the master server, I'll move the name and, I thought, make it the HA name for the pair - thus getting around the infamous "can't rename the master server" problem. That's why I was thinking this would be easy to pull off.

I don't know if the company will spring for $15k worth of services, though. Kinda doubles the cost of the whole project.

From: Bryan Bahnmiller [mailto:bbahnmiller AT dtcc DOT com]
Sent: Tuesday, October 13, 2009 1:58 PM
To: Donaldson, Mark
Subject: Re: [Veritas-bu] Converting stand-alone Master to clustered Master

Mark,

Ugh... Don't envy that task. A few comments.

The master server has to run on the virtual name (relocatable IP and dns name.) This name and the names of the individual nodes are in the EMM db. If you kept the name of the current master as your virtual name, it should be a simpler task. Also, the agent is very intrusive. (Especially on Windows.) There are agent options that can only be set via the bpclusterutil command. That tells me that the agent is not all that, what, conforming?

At the conference I went to, a Symantec employee was asked why changing the name of the backup server is not supported. He said that the name of the NBU master server is in 14 different places on Windows servers and 11 places on Unix servers. And the names in the different places have to be changed in the correct order. One mistake and nothing works.

I sat in on some very interesting discussions about NBU HA. What are you trying to accomplish? Most of the people I talked with agreed that the main thing HA will give you is the capability of doing server maintenance with minimal impact. Most hardware now is pretty reliable. When was the last time you had a nic or hba fail? When the server fails over, all backups stop. After a failover, you will still have to clear out tape drives, restart backups and so on. The only currently allowed HA configuration is active/passive. So you do have one server sitting there idling, waiting for the other server to fail over.

Also, if you have the disk mirrored with VxVM, you'll have to see if that is supported with the Linux agent for failover too.

Bryan

"Donaldson, Mark" <Mark.Donaldson AT Staples DOT com>
Sent by: veritas-bu-bounces AT mailman.eng.auburn DOT edu
10/13/2009 02:32 PM

To
<veritas-bu AT mailman.eng.auburn DOT edu>

cc

Subject
[Veritas-bu] Converting stand-alone Master to clustered Master

Page 14 of the NB High Availability guide:

=========
NetBackup does not support the conversion of an existing non-failover
NetBackup server to a failover NetBackup server. Contact Symantec
Enterprise Technical Support.
=========

Huh?

Should be easy, I'd think. Why would I need Tech Support?

Has anyone done this?

BTW: also converting from Solaris to Linux at the same time if I can
pull this off...

-Mark
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