Upgrade from BE 12.5 to current

[ikmon2000]

We currently are using BE 12.5 on a Win 2003 server. We are getting ready to retire the server and install BE on a new server. Is it best to migrate the old BE 12.5 to the new server and then upgrade it, upgrade it first and then migrate it,  or to start fresh with a new install of the current BE on the new server? If starting fresh is the way to go is it as simple as installing and rebuilding the jobs and media sets?

Also wondering what the improvements/differences are between 12.5 and currrent?

Thanks

[Colin_Weaver]

To be honest it's probably better to start fresh, including fresh tapes and drives (and even consider just mothballing the existing servers but maintaining it as is just in case you need to restore older data).

Reason for this is BE 16 (the latest version) won't install on anything older than 64bit 2008 R2, but might be able to backup some older OS versions. Which kind of means a change of hardware and OS will almost certainly be needed. On top of that you cannot directly upgarde 12.5 to BE 16 anyway and whilst media sets are still used, they are no longer used for handling disk based backups and are only applicable to tapes.

With regards needing fresh tapes and drives, if the server is running older technology there is a chance you are not using the latest tape hardware either which may affact things like overall capacity per tape and performance.

Be sure to very very carefully check the SCL of the newer BE versions before changing versions as older technologies such as

- Earlier Exchange , SQL and Sharepoint versions

- Earlier operating Systems including 32 bit operating systems and hardware

- Lotus Domino

etc, may no longer be supported.

[ikmon2000]

Thanks for the reply.

We will be using a new dedicated Win server 2012R2 or 2016 and was planning to move over our current library which is a Dell TS2000 with an LTO 4 drive athough i am leaning towards upgrading it to a 5 or 6. We are currently backing up Win servers with OS ranging from 2008-2012 with maybe a 2003. Now we run incremental jobs during the week and fulls on the weekend. We then send the fulls off site for a 5 week rotation. end of month and end of year go offsite forever. We will need to be able to continue to backup the current servers as well as add the ability to backup SharePoint 2013 at the file level. (not sure if there is a seperate agent needed for SP)

I was leaning towards the fresh install but wasnt clear if i would need anything from the old BE 12.5 to read and restore from the old tapes created with BE12.5 using the current BE? (This is important)

Can you just push out the new agents and will they automatically upgrade the 12.5 ones or do you need to go into each server and uninstall the old ones?

[Colin_Weaver]

You can only push install agent upgrades over the more recent ones so 12.5 agents will have to be uninstalled before you can push install the new ones.

Also if you are backing up something we no longer support you won't be able to restore  using the new server which means you might still need your 12.5 server around.

If you only backup to tapes currently you can copy the catalogs over from old to new to provide the restore selections but that still leaves an issue as the tapes will not have their correct overwrite protection at this point and could be used by another job.

If you are Ok to inventory all of the 12.5 tapes and then immediately put them in a holding media set with a longish overwrite protection period and use new tapes for any future jobs, then not an issue, but if you want the 12.5 tapes to become usuable against the same overwrite protection as they have on the 12.5 server then you will need the media sets and the tape inventory (which is all inside the Backup Exec database) and then it gets very tricky

Being on 12.5 and almost certainly on 32bit hardware, you will have to upgrade the existing 12.5 server (as an inplace upgrade) to whatever the highest version of BE is that supports the direct upgarde and will run in your environment  (but avoiding BE 2012) and then install the same version of BE on the new server (assuming this version supports the same OS as the new server). Then migrate the database, catalogs and job logs across between the servers and make sure that is working.

Then do another inplace upgrade on the new server to get to latest version - there are a lot of potentially complicated steps in this process, hence the recommendation to mothball existing an build a new setup.