Thought I would share my experience using BE2012 so far. I tend to like being on the bleeding edge (pros and cons) so I went straight into production with it.
All of this is based on backup up Vmware vSphere 4.1 environment to dedupe store using SAN based backups.
I upgraded from 2010 r3 all hotfixes with no issues on my media server.
Upgrade report was handy and I had to tweek a few jobs that had been seperated out due to how the policy and selection list logic has changed.
Pushed out the agent upgrade to all servers without too many problems.
Realised Windows 2000 agent install isnt supported after the fact so had to find a different way to back these up. Oops.
Took a little bit to get my head around the new server based protection logic and I ended up blowing away all my backup jobs to reconfigure them anew to get the new approach in my head. For those you havent used it yet for multiple/remote servers it is really different but very nice and logical once you've used if a few times. I dont recommend diving it with to many remote servers to backup if you havent used it before particulrarly if you have mixed types of backups like B2D, Dedupe, and tape duplication.
Media sets are gone for disk based backup. Retention for backup sets is now set by the job itself. Its quite nice actually but might have you scratch your head sometimes. Media sets for tape are still there.
Groupings of Storage and there associated jobs is great in my opinion.
Selection lists also did my head in particularly late on a friday night getting everything reconfigured before the backup window closed. Again the "server protection" logic is used here by selecting the servers under the Backup & Restore tab then choosing a pre configured job to run which is quite nice.
One thing to note with Vcenter backups and the selection list server order: If you want to select which Vms get backuped up and in a certain order then you need to clear the selection then tick each server IN ORDER OF HOW YOU WANT IT BACKED UP. I find this frustrating and couldnt find another way to do it or to move the Vms in the selection list up or down. Maybe someone else has an answer on this one?
Overall it seems more intuative and smooth interface wise. Although sometimes is seems you can only work it the way it wants to work.
So hows it running. So far not that good.
First full backup of 27 odd servers using AVVI and GRT as well as GRT for exchange worked well.
The second one somehow corrupted my dedupe store so I though, lets start again.
Blew away the dedupe store and run another full. Exchange being first in my selection it got to Updating Catalogues but never seemed to process the GRT portion. When viewing the contents of the backup set (another nice feature) the VMDKs are there but no file drilldown.
Had to kill the job.
Third attempt at Full backup. Removed Exchange this time. Enabled GRT for SQL also this time. Launched the backup and it hung on Pre-Processing for a bit over an hr. Had to reboot to kill the job.
Rebooted vcenter server just incase this was an issue as I couldnt see any backup activity hitting it for snapshotting.
Launched 4th Full backup attempt. Same issue with pre-processing.
Launched a repair of the install just in case.
Fifth attempt at Full backup. Prre-processing again..... 25mins so far.
So not much luck overall so far. Will keep you posted.
