BUEX 12.5 and EV8.0

[Judy_Glazier]

Can anyone confirm or deny that Backup Exec 12.5 EV Agent does not work with EV8.0 and if it is true will it work with EV8.0 SP1 due out in April?

Judy Glazier

[rewritten]

I can confirm that it does not support EV8.0. This is due to a number of changes in EV8.0 and the April timeline you stated is only tentative. I have been told that the Agent upgrade may not make it into BE 12.5 SP2 - it is a limitation of the BE Agent and not EV8.0 - so that would mean a November release. Why do i know this you ask?

Well a company I am doing some work for just purchase Backup Exec 12.5 on the advice of their Symantec Rep as they were an EV shop but were backing up with Commvault. The sales pitch was based around the "wonderful" integration between the 2 products. Well that would have been true if they then did not recommened the upgrade from their existing EV7.5 implmenetation to EV8.0 to take advantage of the new features. Only then after the purchase was completed and EV upgraded was the company informed of the "limited" support provided for BE12.5 and EV8.0 integration.

How this ever happened is beyond me.

[Paul_Grimshaw · Accepted solution]

As rewritten has stated 12.5 is not supported in the EV8 system as rightly suggested this is because of the fundamental changes to our storage architecture to vastly improve our single instancing.

The last communication that I saw on this was that the plan was to support EV8 in V12.6 which is scheduled for Nov 09 and this is due to the agent needing a rewrite to understand the new storage architecture and the new backup commands that come with EV8 and supercede the old way of stopping services changing registry keys and restarting services.

The agent still works using the legacy backup method (because it doesn’t understand the new command in EV 8), but will not detect the VSG or fingerprint databases, so you would need to backup these up separately from SQL. You could create a selection list in Backup Exec that had the EV resources (SQL DBs (excluding VSG DBs), indexes and Vault Stores), and then add the VSG SQL DBs to the selection list. This would then backup all the EV resources, and those VSG SQL DBs in the same job, but in the event of a restore, it would then mean you would have make sure you added the VSG SQL DBs to the restore selection list.

[Judy_Glazier]

Thanks for the clarification Paul

Muchly appreciated. 

Judy Glazier

[Richard-ADRA]

Hi Paul,

We recently installed EV7.5 then upgraded to 8.0 shortly after that. We are on BE12.5. Indexes are on the EV server, messages are on a Data Domain Dedupe device. We are not taking EV into full production yet because of the backup agent issue -- we want a good backup procedure in place before rolling this out. I appreciate your pointers above for making a legacy backup. We don't have in-house SQL expertise. We could use specific instructions on configuring our EV8.0 backup. What is the best way to get help with this?

Richard

[Wayne_Humphrey]

run pre and post backup scripts.

1. Place Enterprise Vault into read only mode. (regkeys or power-shell)
2. Dump SQL databases, I can provide some scripts but can recommend using the SQL stored proc to do this. (its in the documantation shiped with the product)
3. Backup SQL / Index / Vault Stores
4. Place Enterprise Vault into read write mode

Not to be against the agent but it is just as easy without using pre and post, plus you can get some customization going too.

--wayne

[alan_koch]

Is there any official update as to when Symantec will release a workable Backup Exec 12.5 agent for Enterprise Vault 8.0?

Thanks,
Alan

[JolaineY]

I don't know when a new agent will be released, but there is documentation available that may be helpful:

Protecting Enterprise Vault 8.0 with Backup Exec for Windows Servers 12.5 Agent for Enterprise Vault
http://support.veritas.com/docs/321595

 

[alan_koch]

Thanks for the reply.  I have seen this document and it is helpful as a workaround until the new agent is released.  I am still hoping to get someone to give me a definitive answer as to when a new working agent will be released.

Alan