Upgrading Backup Exec remote agents after service pack upgrade

[be-nugget]

Hello,

I have a situation whereby we may need to upgrade the existing backup exec 12.5 SP1 environment up to SP4 to resolve some issues we are having.

Now because this is the same major version of backup exec i.e. 12.5 after I have installed SP4 on the media server when I come to push the agents out to the existing remote agents, can I just do a normal install over the top of the existing agent? and if so can I get away without a reboot?

If not do I need to uninstall the agent, reboot, install new agent, reboot?

Just wanted to know what the best practice was and ultimately if downtime was required, which obviously I would like to avoid.

Hope someone can offer any experiences they've had with doing SP upgrades on the same version and deploying new agents.

[CraigV · Accepted solution]

Hi there,

You can do a normal push-install like you know how. All it will do is detect that there are updates available, and push these out. This is how the upgrade is performed.

There should be no downtime, but if you have a Windows 2000-based server, you'll probably need a reboot due to the AOFO upgrade.

I have seen SOME reboots needed for Win2K3 servers, but these are few and far between. It doesn't stop the agent from working, but you might get some warnings in your jobs. This just allows you to reboot at your leisure.

If you get stuck with a push-install, you can then consider doing as manual install as per the Tn below:

 http://www.symantec.com/business/support/index?page=content&id=TECH91735

Laters!

[AmolB]

Simply push out updates from the Media server, you will get a prompt to reboot 

the server for the changes to take effect. No need to uninstall the agent.

[be-nugget]

Hi Craig, thanks for confirming what I thought\hoped :)

I have seen the "you're not using the latest agent" exception message in backup jobs before and if we need to reboot at our leisure to sort thats fine.

[CraigV]

Cool...no problems.

Yeah, as long as your backups don't fail because of them, they're just warnings. Obviously the sooner the better, but they shouldn't all of a sudden cause issues.

If you come right here, will you close this off?

Laters!

[brorob]

I tried simply pushing the remote agent updates to several of my remote servers after upgrading to SP4, said there were something like 34 updates available but the install failed on all my servers.  Saw some other posts about manually installing.  I manually installed all of the .msp files that were copied to the servers and they seemed to install fine but when I verify the installation of these by running the push install again, the server still says there are 34 updates available.  I want to make sure these updates get installed because I had a situation a while back where a security audit of my network was rated very low because of a BackupExec update that wasn't installed and that gave out the administrator's password.  Ever since then, I've been trying to install these updates as they are available.

Thanks for your help.

Robert