Appliance version 3.1.1 (NBU Version 8.1.1)?

[bak]

Has anyone upgraded to Appliance Version 3.1.1 (NetBackup version 8.1.1)?  We are running 8.1 / 3.1, and are thinking about applying the new version soon, wondering whether people have had good experiences with the new version.

[jeffw4]

I'll let you know here in a bit. Not off to a good start. Going from 8.0 to 8.1.1 today and the first 5330 we tried it on crashed the appliance. We have had a Sev 1 case open with Veritas for just under 2hrs now with not so much as even an email and we are in a critically down state.

The appliance rebooted and is now stuck at a Pane is Dead screen in the IPMI console with no prompt on main, but when you switch to shell its the anaconda prompt. No idea what is going on, but this doesn't look good so far.

Prime example of why I do not like upgrading to the latest and greatest...went against my better judgement on this one.

[jeffw4]

Yeah so my recommendation would 100% be DO NOT upgrade to 3.1.1 if you have appliances. This upgrade has completely crashed one of our 5330's to the point where it needs to be re-imaged back to 3.0!

[mikennedy]

we have been on 3.1.1 (upgraded from 2.7.3) for about a month.  we have about 20 appliances, a mix of 5230 & 5240s.  we have not begun upgrading clients to 8.1.. so they are pretty much all still 7.7.3. 

we were having seious issues with our NDMP de-dupe rates and the upgrade resolved that quite nicely.  Another benefit has been the same NDMP backups are completing in a shorter backup window than before. Also a nice benefit.

However, we are starting to see some issues.  after a couple weeks uptime, our heavy hitter VADP backup appliances started returning '87' errors mostly on VADP client backups.  Recycling NBU services clears that up for a time.

We have also had 3 appliances just sort of lock up with kernal panic errors.  Rebooting clears it (of course) and support has thus far not been able to identify a root cause.  All 3 incidents are still open, but aren't really going anywhere.  

It kind of looks like we may have to start rebooting or recycling services on a 30 day calendar until they figure out where the issue is.  We have been down this road before, and it will probably be a long haul unfortunately.

We kind of 'had' to upgrade due to aforementioned de-dupe issues, but if i wasn't having a problem that 8.1.1/3.1.1 is going to supposedly fix, i would not upgrade.