Migration to Netbackup 6.0

After 6 months of my IT career our client, the "biggest travel management company" in Europe, wanted to move to an enterprise level distributed backup applications software from the existing IB* software.

Below is the complete story.....

Initial hiccups

It was all buzzing activity in office. Various software solutions were being considered.  We started from bottom by preparing Excel sheets, presentations, offshore and onsite persons ratio, work flow reporting , media management, vaulting, and backup success ratio.

Main points we considered were:

1.  Existing IT setup - as you can't force customer to make large scale changes.
2. Future growth - hot fix , maintainence packs, patch updates from vendor
3. Customer support - without it your sometime helpless
4. Compatability with hardware devices - hardware vendors should have also tested their products on the software your deploying
5. COST

After doing all this for 2 weeks and various meetings with customer, IT services provider, and product supplier of software and hardware, the final decision was NETBACKUP 6.0

Important Features that wond NetBackup 6.0 the job:

1. Hot catalog which is backup of various internal databases, policies, configuration files while running usual backups so no separate backup window to run configuration file backup.
2. Synthetic backups building most recent full backup from previous full backup and few incremental backups.
3. EMM server is a hallmark of NBU 6.0
4. NBU's compatabily with NetApps Nearstore
5. Shared storage option

Deployment from IT Infrastructure Point of View

We had four domains across 3 locations and 3 datacentres. There were a variety of different operating systems including Windows 2003/2000/NT ,Red Hat Linux ,Solaris, Apple OS. There were also various Exchange and Database servers, Windows SQL server 2000, Windows exchange 2003/2000 exchange cluster node,and 20 application servers [a few of them directly used by pilots, airlines ticketing desks etc]. All of the data on all of these servers needed to be backed up.

Netbackup master media EMM servers were installed with tape libraries from storagetek SL500 12 drives which was done from onsite then HP library HP drives media used LTO2 media 200/400 GB compression. From offshore location we had to do various client installation which was done three days as there was vast numbers of different clients.

While doing client installation we had to keep in mind the following things:

• Make sure u have administrative rights
• Be careful about port numbers

While doing installation in citrix-based client servers I got the following prompt:

terminal server must be in install mode before you install a program

To solve, I followed these steps:

Go to cmd

Run change \install command

After this installation can be done easily.

Things from My Experience

• Test all the backups in all the policies. Multiplexing options, multiple data steams, logs in master, media and in all the clients.
• Copy date, time from one policy to another.
• Check for avrd demons / GUI automatic volume recognition may be robotic arm is stuck drives will work only for the media on which it is currently writing but it will not change to next media as robotic arm is stuck.
• Keep different deactivated policy for storage groups like different policies consist of only SG1, only SG2 with clients in case of some emergency. Remove client which is not required and run backup of only 1 client for individual storage group.
• Have frequncy based + calender based schedule separately for daily backups and yearly backups.

Most will perform properly but what happens when disaster or trouble starts and you and your company reputation is at stake?

Troubles We Faced

1. Disaster recovery plan RTO was less backup + restore at the same time.... From the same exchange server but different storage group different.
2. Access to client was denied error code 59 Storage unit changed as a temporary solution then got maintenance pack installed and got the problem fixed.[all credit to Symantec for quick response]
3. Netbackup console in hung state byte count of jobs will not increase all the required services and processes were running. Windows task manager can show netbackup processes check from various media and master servers or run bpps -a 3-4 times continuosly CPU utilization of various processes should change like bptm , bpdbm etc.
4. Snapshot was installed on the server still file server missed some files.. makeshift solution.. created another policy to backup skipped files kept the selection list to backup only those files which were missed.
5. Antivirus version was not letting backups complete. Under exchange policy backups will not run then after taking with support from Symantec and antivirus company excluded VSP cache folder from being scanned.

As i mentioned before, we were originally concerned about future growth--which proved true. Since the original install, we have made th following changes.

1. Recently added VMware clients in our setup[Netbackup was first backup product to give thisoption]
2. Moved from LTO 2 to LTO 3. Use vmpool command.
3. Never realised it before that incident TIR is awesome features we restored just ... 200 MB of data related to airlines saved customer full flight cost without that file they can't fly their packed flight ...[being at IT side I was unaware of cost issues from business perspective]
4. After adding new media server contacted symantec support on phone for registry entry in windows.

In the End
Positive points I can write after 15 months being in to Netbackup team

1. Easy GUI console
2. Wizards for various options importing, catalog setup, new volume pool
3. Existing numerous options according to requirement of backup example synthetic backup, advance client, flashbackup, SSO, share point backup.
4. Future growth --- each server performing its role master media i feel with introduction of

EMM it has covered leaps n bounds.

In these 15 months of netbackup journey has proved amazing for me as I got opportunity to do hands on stuff. I've faced some problems and solved them. I've learned from them what to do and what not to do: basic mistakes which the information on the Symantec site and tips from Connect forum from very experienced peers helped me to solve..

In short
Cheers and two thumbs up for SYMANTEC