When I say no limit it is kind of tounge in cheek. If you have enough money to buy and use 50 media servers then you have enough money to buy another master server. I would not suggest going over 50 media servers but I have seen over 100 in a single NetBackup environment. Best solution? Not in my opinion.

I agree with Stumpr.

I would like to add that you need to remember that you need to have space for the NetBackup Catalog data or the EMM database as well which grows for every media server and based on the amount and type of backups that you are running.  There are some charts for calculating this space requirement.

Joe

Pls refer the performance, planning and tuning guide 281842 for more inputs

" Veritas NetBackup™ Backup Planning and Performance Tuning Guide  "

We have a customer who is having 180 media servers for a single master.

This is not a good situation since the master is always overloaded and has very less idle time free.

Mahesh

One master and many media servers although seemingly simple, does give rise to various issues - one being downtime ...

I always try to allow a backup environment some idle time, so that if need be, mainatainance or whatever can be slotted in with minimum backups being affected - yes, it does mean that you have expensive kit sitting there doing nothing, but the benefits of the ability to have a maintainance windows far out weigh this.

Another issue, it that if you should have an issue that takes down the master server, the whole environment is gone, with separate master servers, at least some stay running.

Martin

I've been in an environment with 80 before, mostly SAN Media Servers. It's not a problem really assuming you're not trying to do SSO or something amongst all of them. =) 

That said, doing upgrades or maintenance on the NetBackup environment was a royal pain. I'd call administrative overehead the biggest limiting factor in the number of media servers you have per Master.