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Mozje's avatar
Mozje
Level 3
15 years ago
Solved

Catalog migration

Dear all,

I'm currently looking into moving our netbackup catalog to other hardware/platform. In order to this I'm lookinng for some pointers from people who already have experience in doing this, so here goes :)

Current environment: Solaris 10 / Nbu 7.0.1 / VTL
New environment: Linux / NBU 7.0.1 / VTL

Accoording to me this migration can be done using a simple backup/restore scenario. However our current backup window is extremly big (20 hours for a full backup of a 2TB catalog). so I'm expecting our restore window to be similar in time duration if not longer. Sadly enough this is not exceptable by management.

So..... I was thinking of taking a full backup to a new VTL then rezone this VTL to the new environment and do a restore. Once this has completed, I want to rezone the VTL again and take an incremental catalog backup. Then rezone once more and restore this incremental backup.

Now for the question :-)
Is this possible ? Can I do a full restore and then an incremental, or will a catalog restore always start from the last full backup in order to the restore. And should it do so, would this be a showstopper for putting the new environment into production ?
Basicly I'm looking for a ways to put the new environment into production ASAP, meaning backup policy's and master server configuration. Importing the catalog images can be restored later on condition that we can do this with the new environment in production.

Any ideas, comments, suggestions, tips regarding this will be greatly appreciated :-)

 

7.1.x and Earlier
Backup and Recovery
NetBackup
Recovering
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  • Marianne's avatar
    Marianne
    15 years ago

    Your plan seems quite feasible - I cannot see why full restore followed by incremental won't work.

    My suggestion is to schedule a 'trial run' first.

    My problem with restoring the images at a later stage is that the EMM database will be out of sync. You don't want to get to situation where you will need to import all tapes....

    This TN http://www.symantec.com/docs/TECH77448 documents extra steps for 6.x Linux masters (make a copy of the file /usr/openv/var/global/server.conf on the new master server before restoring the catalog backup to it. ). The assumption is that 7.x masters are not affected, but it won't do any harm to make a copy - just in case...

5 Replies

  • Marianne's avatar
    Marianne
    Level 6
    15 years ago

    Your plan seems quite feasible - I cannot see why full restore followed by incremental won't work.

    My suggestion is to schedule a 'trial run' first.

    My problem with restoring the images at a later stage is that the EMM database will be out of sync. You don't want to get to situation where you will need to import all tapes....

    This TN http://www.symantec.com/docs/TECH77448 documents extra steps for 6.x Linux masters (make a copy of the file /usr/openv/var/global/server.conf on the new master server before restoring the catalog backup to it. ). The assumption is that 7.x masters are not affected, but it won't do any harm to make a copy - just in case...

  • MCron's avatar
    MCron
    Level 4
    15 years ago

    I can't say that I have ever thought or done it that way (using the VTL).  I have used the recovery tools to do migrations, and a full restore followed by an incremental restore does work.  I would agree with Marianne in that a test should be don first, and you can use a VTL to do that easily. 

    One other way that you may want to consider is using a file copy utility such as FileZilla to make the copies of the needed files (Catalog and EMM).  For large systems this approach works well since it will skip files that are already copied, so only those changes need to come over.  So, you can FTP the files on one day, then just do the update the next and switch.

    -Mark

  • teiva-boy's avatar
    teiva-boy
    Level 6
    15 years ago

    I've been told before that 2TB is in the upper limit of what a catalog should not grow to.  That at the 1.5TB size one should be looking at creating a new Master server and splitting up some of the domain.  You may want to validate that..  This was something I had picked up from some of the Product Management and Technical Product Managers.

  • Mozje's avatar
    Mozje
    Level 3
    15 years ago

    Thanks for the replies everyone. It looks like i  missed a chapter in the manual which explains that I can do full and incremental restores on a catalog.
    So I will continue on Marianne's and MCron's recomendations.

    As for the huge catalog size, I have picked up on a command called bparch to archive the netbackup catalog, I'm looking in to deploying that into our environment aswell. Reason for the catalog being so big, is because our legal department insists on keeping things way to long ;-)

  • Amit_Karia's avatar
    Amit_Karia
    Level 6
    15 years ago

    Just to add to your last point rather than re-zoning entier VTL to old server and then back to new server, you can always use rsynch for incremental catalog depending on amount of change happening and your network bandwidth