VSP by default enabled on all Windows backup Clients?

NBU 6.5 was the last NBU version that included VSP. But even in NBU 6.5, Symantec recommended to use Windows VSS for W2003 and higher clients.

NBU 7.x uses VSS as default for WOFB.
WOFB is automatically enabled for Windows Clients.
To change or disable, add Client name to Host Properties -> Master -> Client Settings.

All of this is explained in NBU Admin Guide I.
Links to all manuals of all NBU versions can be found in 'Handy NBU Links' in my signature.

Some good tech notes :

http://www.symantec.com/docs/TECH47808  - How to verify Windows Open File Backup operation using VSSADMIN and BPFIS before contacting Symantec Technical Support

 

http://www.symantec.com/docs/TECH156732 - How to configure NetBackup to choose a specific VSS Provider when more then one provider is present on the OS

YES! in earlier versions of NetBackup the default was VSP and I had to change the setting using bpclient in a for-loop

 

http://www.symantec.com/business/support/index?page=content&pmv=print&impressions=&viewlocale=&id=TECH126295

 

DOCUMENTATION: How to enable or disable Veritas Snapshot Provider (VSP) from the command line.

http://www.symantec.com/docs/TECH32327

bpclient -client< client_name> -L

If this command returns a message "bpclient: no entity was found (227)", none of the client options for that client have been configured and the default Windows Open File Backup settings are used. The default settings are: VSP enabled, Individual snapshots, and Abort on error
 

I was just motivated to check our current NetBackup 7.5.0.4 environment where most all of the clients have NetBackup 7.0.1 installed and found this:

for i in `bpplclients -allunique -noheader | grep -i window | awk '{print $3}' | sort`; do bpclient -client $i -L | grep -i vsp; done

bpclient: no entity was found (227)
bpclient: no entity was found (227)
 WOFB FIM:      VSP
 WOFB FIM:      VSP
bpclient: no entity was found (227)
bpclient: no entity was found (227)
 

Now I just need to change the grep to an egrep so I can get the name of the clients with VSP enabled. Once a client is set to VSP it will sit there fat, dumb and stupid until you manually change it from the master server client attributes or the bpclient command.

 

 

Yes & no. I agree with all of the above!

From 7.x it is no longer an option (or certainly not the default) (see EDIT)

[[EDIT (to clarify) taken from the 7.5 Admin Guide:

By default, no clients are listed in the Client Attributes dialog box. The server uses the
following Windows Open File Backup defaults for all Windows clients:
■ Windows Open File Backup is enabled on the client.
■ Microsoft Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS) is used for NetBackup 7.0 clients.

and, later:

■ Use Veritas Volume Snapshot Provider (VSP)
This option specifies that VeritasVSP be used as the snapshot provider. VSP is required for Windows 2000 clients and can also be used on 6.x Windows 2003 clients.
■ Use Microsoft Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS)
This option specifies that MicrosoftVSS be used to create volume snapshots of volumes
and logical drives for the selected clients.
In 7.0, MicrosoftVSS should be selected for all Windows clients, as VSP is not available.

end of EDIT]]

Prior to that it was not recommended but it *was* the default.

In those earlier versions, we found that, if you did not add your Windows client to the Master Server Properties/Client attributes & change the settings to suit then, NB by default used WOFB and VSP.

You can see from the attachment that a new client just added to the Master Server Properties (NB6.5.6) has these setting added by default - & this is confirmed by NetBackups context sensitive help:

 

This was one of the most silly things I've seen.. never understood why FIM enabled and VSP as method was the default. So did the following, to prevent getting the "no entity was found" on the clients that were still not added thru bpclient:

find /usr/openv/netbackup/db/class -name clients | xargs cat | grep -v VMD | grep -i windows | awk '{print $1}' | sort -u | while read i;do
bpclient -client $i -add -WOFB_FIM 1
bpclient -client $i -update -WOFB_FIM 1
done

The above will list out all the unique windows clients, and add/update them to use VSS instead of VSP.
Alternativelly you can change it for:

bpclient -client $i -add -WOFB_enabled 0
bpclient -client $i -update -WOFB_enabled 0

And prevent all windows clients from using Windows Open File Backup.