I recently upgraded one of our two Windows 2003 Servers from BE 10d to BE 12. This upgrade included one BE 10d server and 10 remote agents for Windows.
I copied all of the catalog files to a seperate location in case of any problems ahead of time.
The server upgrade itself went perfectly smooth. I was able to retain all of my media sets, catalogs, jobs and job history. Everything made it through the transition without a problem. I tried running BE V12 to V10 agents the first night, but came in the next morning to find the job failed. The error log stated "The target computer is running a previous version of the BE Remote Agent. You must upgrade the Remote Agent." It still backed up data, but was showing the job as a 'failed' status. From my reading and testing, I was under the impression that I'd have no problems in this scenario. In my test lab, I was able to back up stuff from agent 10, so I don't quite know why it was a problem in production.
The morning following the server upgrade, I upgraded all of the clients and that went well. On every remote agent machine (and the server itself), I verified in Symantec Antivirus that the boxes for Opened for Backup and Enable Tamper Protection were unchecked.
Since then, my backups have been very solid, and the speeds have increased across the board. While on BE 10d, I was backing up a total of 386 GB over 9 hours at a rate of 725 MB/Hour. On BE 12 I am seeing the same data set taking 7 hours at a rate of 915 MB/Hour.
None of my hardware changed at all during this process. For reference, the BE V12 server is a Dell 2850, 3Ghz CPU, 12 GB RAM with an Adaptec 39160 Ultra 160 SCSI Card. The Tape Drive is a Quantum SDLT 600 with an Ultra 160 SCSI interface. The remote agent servers are a mix of Dell 2650s and 2850s with various CPUs and amounts of RAM.
One other thing we noted was the stability has improved, at least for us. In the past, if we canceled an active job, we always had to restart the server because it would show 'No idle devices found'. This is no longer an issue for us.
Overall my upgrade from 10d to 12 was a very smooth and seamless process. At this point, the upgrade was well worth the time and testing for us.
Hopefully this helps anyone looking to upgrade.
Message Edited by Bryan Ricke on
04-16-2008 12:29 PMMessage Edited by Bryan Ricke on
04-16-2008 12:34 PM
