Hey Mate,

From what I heard Symantec is creating 7.5.0.1 as quickly as possible to address issues found in 7.5 FA and GA. SYMC division responsible for appliances, decided to wait for that NBU release. I would advise waiting for the official release, especially that 2.5 will support VMware VADP. :)

Cheers

Thank you for the post but i didnt see it in time.  I just started the 7.5 upgrade and guess what it failed as normal with every netbackup upgrade i have ever done!!

Now my master server is fubar and Im waiting on a call from support. 

Stanley, you were trying to upgrade your 5200 to the 7.5 NBU core release?

-Chad

Sorry chad i didnt specify that in the original post.  I just wanted to see if anyone was running 7.5 on the master with a 2.0.2 appliance and if there were any gotchas anywhere.  I know there two different servers but i always seem to have strange issues when I upgrade either one to a new release.

yup, we upgraded our master server to 7.5 and have a 5200 at 2.0.2

MOST things are working..  backups of all physical machines, but something's wrong somewhere in VMware - land.  those backups are failing, or showing as successful in activity monitor with only 1 attempt, and still i'm getting email that it failed with a "13".

Also, I can't browse my host for new virtual machines to add to the policies.  And of course you can't use the new VMware policy type till your media server is at 7.5 also.

How's the best way to find out when the appliance version containing 7.5 is released? 

Dont you just love it! Its funny i actually got a call from a support asking i would do a quick survey on the appliances and netbackup.  My largest complaint was this very situation.  She said that is what they are hearing alot of. 

All I know is that an update is "suppose" to be out sometime in May for the appliance. Because i acutally have two problems and support said they could either let a backline engineer work on it and get quick fix or i could wait unitl may to get the next release that "should" have the fixes i need.  Other than that i really dont know of a way to be notified when the update is out because to this day i have yet to get an email letting me know when new releases are available.  I find out here on the forums.

Here are my main issues. 

1. Accelerator doesnt work with the 5200

2. AIR has issues importing images when a 7.5 master is replicating to a 5200 setup as a master. 

All, the current release date for N_2.5 that will be a 7.5.0.2 build of NBU is slated to be released June 4th.  That's not 100% confirmed so it could possibly slide, but that's the target date and I think the release should happen within a couple days of that.  They had to push it back a couple weeks in order to facilitate using the .0.2 patch revision instead of 7.5.0.0 code.

I hadn't heard of the appliances having these kinds of problems with 7.5 masters prior to hearing it now.  Thank you all for your input.

As for notifications to the patch releases, if you go to this link (http://www.symantec.com/business/support/index?page=content&id=TECH150251) you can subscribe to changes to the page.  That will automatically alert you when a new patch gets posted.  Also, I've taken to tweeting things like patch release dates at my work-related Twitter account below, so feel free to follow me if you'd like to hear about new developments in the Symantec appliance world.

The 2.5 code was released yesterday and as usual for me the upgrade failed right on schedule.  Tried to install on my 5200 media server and it failes at Installing Appliance Web UI.  This forces a roll back.  Support ticket here i come.

has ANYONE been successful with this update?  The automated download didn't work, and support said the package release is "staged" so if I want it today, go for the manual process. 

So I downloaded all five parts at the patch website.  And combined them, but you get an invalid "tar" file.  Then looking at the sizes on the website, and the size of the files as I downloaded, looks like part2of2 is not complete.

Do, did anyone get a NB_Appliance_N_2.5.0.x86_64-tar-split.2of5 that is REALLY the 1792 MB that is "advertised"..  I keep getting around 863..

Lynne,

I've had that problem before with these file and i had to keep trying to download it.  Sometimes it took 3 and four time for me.

I've had issues with downloads corrupting when my cache is extremely full.  I have successfully downloaded 2of5 with Google Chrome (I haven't tried any other browsers) on the first try. 

Okay, clear browser cache in IE (8) and Firefox (12) -- even acted like a "user" and rebooted my computer.

No matter what I use, or how many times I download, 2of2 is 863,073 bytes..  not the 1792 MBytes the website says.

Am I at the wrong place?

http://www.symantec.com/business/support/index?page=content&id=TECH188184

Oh, also, I did concatenate the five anyway and it's not a valid tar file.  Sadness

All, thought you might be interested to hear that the conversation on this thread prompted one of our Sr. Managers in the appliance group to shoot me an e-mail asking for some thoughts on why this process is so difficult for you, our customers and some thoughts on how we could make this process more smooth for you all.  

I had some input, but would also like to get some of your thoughts here on this thread as to how we might be able to optimize the delivery process of the appliance patches for you all.  Please provide your feedback, our appliance teams are listening!

What gets me the most and i know this might be beyond control but appliance upgrades/patches are always behind the Netbackup upgrades.  i get pumped up about the new features of netbackup only to find out after i have upgraded my sytem and clients that my appliance is running a version behind and cant utilize any of those features.  And this usually (atleast for me) accompanies weeks worth of troubleshooting because quirky things start happening and i usually find out that its because the appliance is on a different version.

For me its more the timing and coordination of the releases with netbackup and the appliance patches.  Because my grip about not being notified when things were released was solved when chad tipped us off to the alert feature. 

When these appliances and netbackup are in sync you cant beat um!!  But when i have version mismatches I always seem to battle with them until they are all back up to date. 

I know this could be handled on my end by just using a little patiences but i never been very good at that. 

Since the appliance teams are listening i would like to point out that the support group for these appliances is top notch and they have never not solved any problems i have thrown at them!!   

1)  as Stan said, patches are late

2)  "Automated" update is advertised but not available.. "Oh, it's staged and I guess we haven't gotten to you yet", says support.  Grrr, manual process.

3) windows download, 5 huge files, oh, and did I mention sometimes the bits don't download correctly and you might have to do it again.  And again.  And clear your browser cache.  And try another machine.

4) figure out the obscure windows "copy" command to concatenate these all together.   On UNIX it would be easy, but no, now have to learn windows.  AND There's a typo in the instructions, this is at least the second time now without it being correct.

5) another treat -- figure out how to "untar" in windows.  You have to download something from somebody else.  Thrill.  I picked 7zip.  It's OK, but none of this is documented either.

6) Checksum.  Ditto, not a native windows function, had to find something to download.

7)  WOW, Finally ready to get this patch over the appliance it's destined for !!  That was easy !  (Yup, being sarcastic).

8) get on appliance, go through menu system to open share.

9) oh wait!  Can't seem to get there, "A device attached to the system is not functioning"  --

10) call support.  Again.

I could continue, but it's Friday afternoon and I do hope to get home on time. 

Come on guys, this is supposedly an appliance...  aka, self-contained and easy to manage.  I would have been much better off with a nice disk array and a *nix front end media server.  Done.  And saved a lot of money.

Lynne, first off thank you for sharing those things that you have the most difficulty with, and if it would be of value for you I'm more than willing to commit some of my time to making sure your experiences with our appliances are improved.  It's extremely important to all of us here at Symantec that we continually improve to provide our customers with a product experience that is superior.  I guarantee that your comments will be seen (have probably already been seen, you'd be surprised how often our higher ups visit the forums here) by people in the position to make things better.  We (the Symantec folks working on the appliance business) all take this product very personally.  I will send you a private message with my contact information and I look forward to doing whatever I can to help improve your experiences and make sure that you're really feeling the value that we built these appliances to deliver.

From your comments it seems that if there were some automated mechanism that could aid you in the notification, download, extraction and application of appliance patches, that this mechanism would greatly improve your appliance experience, is that correct?  If so, in your ideal model how would you construct this process to be everything you would like for it to be?  

Because that's one of the big advantages when a product, if it were it's own offering from an independant company, would be (as I understand the statistics) the fastest storage startup in history.  The management to the highest levels of Symantec really are focused on bringing the best deduplication appliance on the market to our customers, and to fulfill that vision our appliance teams have a very sizeable pool of resources dedicated to making them the best in the industry.  Some of the most innovative, forward-thinking people I've had the pleasure to know at my time at Symantec.  And they're ALWAYS looking for ideas on better ways to do things or comments on what is most important to you all, our customers.  When the FileStor appliance was discontinued, we didn't just lay off all the people making the code, we brought them over to the NBU appliances team to really double-down on a product that has had arguably the most successful initial launch of anything I've ever seen Symantec produce.

I would like to take this chance to clear up a bit of misunderstanding that I have seen from MANY of my customers and that is the question "why are the appliance patches always late".  The truth of the matter is that the appliance releases depend on the NetBackup core releases to be totally finalized prior to being brought over to the appliance dev team for finalization of the appliance patch.  Obviously we're working on everything in parallel between the two teams, but since the appliance patches also potentially include firmware, OS and driver packages as part of the single patch release so we have to get all that packed together and then perform some additional quality assurance work to make absolutely sure our everything works as it's supposed to.  Unfortunately this process TODAY causes the appliance patches to generally be about 30 days behind the core release.  HOWEVER, as I said, lots of smart people trying to find better ways, they're working to continually improve this process and as those results are demonstrated I think you'll be impressed.

All, while this conversation thread has sparked several conversations on good ways we could handle this on the appliances, that functionality isn't going to be out tomorrow, so I wanted to share some of what I found.  In particular, for those using FireFox, check this out:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/downthemall/?src=hp-dl-featured

For Chrome users, here's a whole list:

http://www.chromeplugins.org/chrome/list-of-download-managers-for-google-chrome/

For those on IE9, as I understand it, there's a download manager already included.  Hopefully these can be of assistance!

After looking through the Chrome list I posted earlier, it was a bit dated......here's a better listing:

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/search/download%20manager?utm_source=chrome-ntp-icon

What a mess this 2.5 release has turned out to be. We upgraded 5220's and have had many issues. The smb/cifs/nfs install share is totally broken for PC and Linux clients. Neither quick install method works at all and if you examine the actual inst client directory on the appliance you'll find broken symlinks to the old windows client versions. They didn't ship a windows administration console at all! I have to use the java client and there is no apparent upgrade path for windows clients, it requires an uninstall of the previous client. The web interface is also incredibly slow now.

Our previously configured synthetic weekly backups failed without warning. We're still experiencing media write 84 errors with VMWare differential backups which was our reason for upgrading in the first place (I've had a ticket open for nearly two weeks on this now). Our dedupe pool grew by about 5TB almost overnight and our rates became awful, it's as if by upgrading none of the previously configured backups count towards our 7.5 dedupe data.

Oh, and best of all... we can't roll back. So even if we wanted to we're stuck. On the positive side, we've managed to rid of our Windows VMWare access host, which the sales team failed to notifiy us about as a requirement from the start. 

Also, support seems mostly unfamiliar with the appliances, and are usually quite confused by the strange versioning differences. I've already recieved two client EEB's which can't be applied because they send the wrong versions. I'm guessing support is really feeling the pain on this release...

Chad, thank YOU for taking the time to inquiry of the customers' experiences / expections / opinions.

I'll try to be calm, but having even more trouble today with this dag-blasted software upgrade, so that might be difficult. 

In my world "appliance" means, well, self-contained, self-maintaining.  I do not have to apply code updates to my toaster, for instance.  Nor do i have to supply a "Master Server" to run it, something about which we were NOT informed by sales and were quite surprised when implementation started. 

We are relatively new to NetBackup in general, not just to the appliance.  And with other "start up" vendors at which we looked, care and maintenance of the appliance was ALL on them.  They did the upgrades, they monitored the device, you just kinda watched your backups.  They even came in and set it all up and wouldn't leave till you were happy. 

So, that's my expectation.

the 5200 falls FAR short, however, any improvement in the cumbersome update process would be appreciated. 

What kind of specifics would you like to hear?  I bet everyone is tired of the saga of our 2.5 update issues.

Lynne,

I'll drop you a line off of the forums as I would like to make sure we're doing everything we can to get you taken care of and relay your input into our product management group.  

MSFA, email sent as well.  Looking forward to discussing some of your points and I think I've got some good news for you on a couple fronts.

Okay, got the 2.5 update downloaded right on the 5200 -- way easier than the manual way --

Went to install.  INSUFFICIENT DISK SPACE ?!?!?!?!   Prolly /opt or /var filled up, but technically, I'm not supposed to know how to drop into root shell.

Opened "Critical" ticket..  let's see how long it takes them to get back to me this time.  Last "major" ticket, it was like 4 days. 

I usaully have pretty good luck with support and the response times.  I just hate how these updates always cause so many issues.  My ticket has been open for 6 days now and im not bothered by that because i know there working on it but i just wish once i could run an upgrade and not have to call support 3 minutes into it.

I have a second appliance offsite that im scared to run the upgrade on because of what issues its then going to have.

Thanks to Frank & Chad, I did get someone to help me figure out what to delete to make room for my upgrade.  A very good "someone" in fact.

However, after the upgrade and reboot, it can't run it's test backup due to media write error (84), going to have to call back.

For anyone looking through this thread I think there's a great point illustrated here that I talk to pretty regularly with my customers and it all boils down to "before something becomes an aggravation for you, call your account team", they can get the right folks mobilized to make sure something that could become a frustration, doesn't.  

I came back to Symantec after two years in the partner world because of the people I found this organization was primarily composed of.  Account teams who are, by and large, extremely focused on making sure our customers get the best we can possibly provide for them.  Leverage them.  They are your proponents, your gateways to all the service Symantec can bring to bear for you.

I personally see one of the key competitve advantages that we, as Symantec, brings to the table is the people that make up our company.  Real people who try to provide our customers with the best products on the market.  Because customers don't buy things from companies, they buy things from people.  And when people stand behind their products the way that Symantec is willing to stand behind these appliances, I think you, our customers, see the value in that.  

For those who have had difficulties in this thread, thank you for the chance to work with you to show you what these appliances can really do for you and we will continue to make sure you're provided the level of support that you deserve.  

On may 17th I posted that 2.5 had been released and of course if failed during my attempt to upgrade.  Well finally with the help of support we were able to get my 5200 appliance to upgrade yesterday evening.  So thank you for helping me solve that issue. 

Because now i get to open 5 more tickets to correct the BS that upgrading my media server to a version that is now higher than my master has caused!

Correct me if i am wrong but isnt some of the complaining on this post pertaining to version mismatches?  My master is running version 7.5.0.1 at which i do not see anything higher and my appliance after the upgrade is running version 7.5.0.2. 

So now..

duplications to tape and replications to my offsite appliance (upgraded to 2.5 also) are failing left and right.  I have jobs stuck trying to run. Some are writing to tape and then they just start kicking out media read errors and the tape mounts and then unmounts over and over until i cancel the job. 

All of the error messages that im seeing point to documention about running versions of netbackup that do not match.  Thats just great. 

I upgrade my master to 7.5 to try and use AIR and accelerator well i have to wait on appliance upgrade to use those features.  I get the appliance upgrade and now AIR and Duplications dont work.  I think this proves the point we are all trying to make here.

In the end maybe the version mismatch is not causing my issues but you can be sure that an upgrade to the appliance has caused them.

oh and thanks for changing the web interface from http://"appliance name"/opscenter to http://"appliance name"/appliance

After speaking with support i was informed that the 2.5 upgrade has a client naming bug.  if you have ever renamed a client then duplications, replication and restores will fail because it is looking to resolve the old name.  He said this has been noted and a fix is in the works but there is not a time frame.

The work around is to look in the catalogue on the appliance print it out and then go thru all your policies and make sure the clients match.  In my case i had 30 clients that had to be changed.  on top of anything that is still trying to replicate or duplicate you must run the following command with the backup id at the end to cancel the job.

E:\Program Files\Veritas\NetBackup\bin\admincmd>nbstlutil cancel -backupid "backup - id"

I have been attempting to upgrade my appliance for two weeks and now i get to spend the next two weeks fixing bugs and pray that nobody needs a file restored. 

After spending hours of going thru the system lastnight I still have a sea of red in the admin console!  I really hope that the product teams are still following this post because I'm done! This marks every upgrade since the system arrived that i have had issues. 

I'm so frustrated by netbackup and the appliance product!

Stanley, I REALLY sympathize.  I'm now dead in the water too.

I tried the accelerator feature, said i didn't have the proper disk devices, but I knew I did.  Checked the forums and found SEVERAL other posts saying there is a licensing glitch, and that the 7.1 to 7.5 license upgrade was faulty, and just call and you'll get a new one and be good to go.

Well, I called tech support.  They gave me a temporary "does everything" license which i put on my master and VOILA!  everything works, including the accelerator feature.

Then I get a call from my "advocate" (great guy) and he gets internal licensing on the phone and they say, no, you didn't put the 7.5 licenses on the 5200, which is true, I didn't.  They sent me a copy of the codes.

Just now, went to add them to the 5200.  Only one of the three "took", rest were called errors, and then nothing would back up.  Took the one that did get accepted off, still can't back up ANYTHING, getting error 84!

Okay, so couple questions:

1) do you really have to put upgraded licenses on your 5200?  Why did mine run OK after I updated the code to 2.5 (which was 7.5 NBU) even though I hadn't done the license "ADD" for the new ones.

2) you folks who called customer care and got licenses regenerated, what did you say to them?  I could not get my message across.

 I've noticed telemetry data filled up "/" on the appliance both in the /tmp directory as well as /var/symantec/telemetry. We have a ticket open to address the issue.

The system is creating 8MB files every few minutes and apparently never cleans them up. I'm getting a little tired of spending so much time tending to software and operating system related issues. I feel like I'm a part time QA employee at symantec.