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SunJustWorks's avatar
SunJustWorks
Level 3
2 years ago

Protection plans VMware

Greetings,

We just completed an upgrade to NBU 10.0.0.1.  We were advised that we should upgrade to the new Protection Plans for our on site VMware installation.  From what I can tell, it appears to be an all-or-nothing routine for backups.  With our current VM policy, we have multiple exclusions from clusters, down to VM client notes attributes. 

So the question is, are the Protection Plans still "work in progress" or will there always be a "Classic" policy.

Thank you in advance!

Linux
  • quebek's avatar
    quebek
    2 years ago

    Hello

    I believe the whole NetBackup is Work In Progress - nothing is written in stone, due to ever changing IT world. 
    So far I am not really making a lot of use of PP as I find (maybe a habit) traditional policies 'better' - just being more familiar with these. IMHO it could be that one day we will have to get rid of traditional policies, but then the PP should be capable of doing the same. Unfortunately I don't know the plans of Veritas...not sure if this helped...

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  • quebek's avatar
    quebek
    Moderator
    2 years ago

    Hello

    I believe the whole NetBackup is Work In Progress - nothing is written in stone, due to ever changing IT world. 
    So far I am not really making a lot of use of PP as I find (maybe a habit) traditional policies 'better' - just being more familiar with these. IMHO it could be that one day we will have to get rid of traditional policies, but then the PP should be capable of doing the same. Unfortunately I don't know the plans of Veritas...not sure if this helped...

  • SunJustWorks's avatar
    SunJustWorks
    Level 3
    2 years ago

    Thank you for your response, definitely did help.  Sometimes just a confirmation of what you see and making sure you are not missing anything is a good check.

    Thanks again for your response!

    • davidmoline's avatar
      davidmoline
      Level 6
      2 years ago

      Hi SunJustWorks 

      Further to quebek response, there are still limitations with PP's. 

      The range of policies supported is limited (it is not available for standard or MS-Windows type backups), and more importabtly (IMHO), the "SLP" equivalent is limited to a backup destination and a secondary destination (unlike an traditiional SLP where you can have many operations).

      I am curious about how many people are using them, there are some advantages in that the plan doesn't require you to add clients - this is done in the workload setup (although this could also be called a disadvantage too).

      Cheers
      David

  • SunJustWorks's avatar
    SunJustWorks
    Level 3
    2 years ago

    Hi davidmoline ,

    You make very good points, thank you for your response, much appreciated.  I too am curious on use cases and how many people are using them.  We have a number of needed excludes that we need, mostly Cisco appliances that do not support VM backups in any fashion. 

  • X2's avatar
    X2
    Moderator
    2 years ago

    We were excluding/including some VMs using "flags" in Notes section of the VM. As the WebUI VIP does not support notes/annotations, we moved to using Tags. So, quebek is right about NetBackup being WIP - with changing times and technologies, NetBackup will evolve and we will have to adapt to that.

    PPs represent a huge change on how to setup or administer NetBackup. They have completely different approach than traditional policies. I tried testing out a new PP in my test domain and it creates things in the background that you don't have control on. For those who have relied on traditional scripting to manage/monitor some parts of NetBackup, it is likely going to be a full overwrite, if at all possible.

     

    • davidmoline's avatar
      davidmoline
      Level 6
      2 years ago

      Hi again

      One important point that was pointed out to me about PPs is that there are some workloads that are only supported by them - such as Kubernetes - there is no traditional policy type to use. 

      Hopefully the limitation on maximum of two copies of backups with PPs will be changed in a future release. 

      David

  • DPeaco's avatar
    DPeaco
    Moderator
    2 years ago

    Another thing to remember here in the Web UI. If you need to change the "backup schedule" in a protection plan? You can't! You must delete the protection plan and create a new PP with the run schedule you want. This holds true in 8.3x, 9.1x and also in 10.x

    Use the Web UI for simple things and when you want to group hosts together that will share the same backup days, times, and retentions. There are things you can do in the web ui, but many other things still require you to use the legacy java based Admin Console to do. In the web ui, you don't have access to view or manage long-term retention to tape. You don't get to see your tape libraries or tape drives either. That, still requires the legacy admin console.