Symantec Appliance 5230 master role

[hytham_fekry]

I have an inquiry about pros and cons of having a separate physical server as master server against making the 5230 appliance have the 2 roles "master,media" what i can think of is to take headache of scheduling from the appliance plus having second point of failure that can communicate with the tape library in case of appliance outage for any reason .. Second question : can i add new capacity based license for the appliance besides existing old license that's on the old master server

[sdo · Accepted solution]

The 5230 can run perfectly fine as a master/media - it all comes down to RTO/RPO, sizing for current, scaling for growth, and of course budget.  The NetBackup Appliances are teriffic in terms of all the worries about OS patching amd HBA firmware and drivers are all removed - it's all done for you.  The 5230 "server and storage" are very easy to manage, leaving you to just worry about your NetBackup "configuration" to match your business requirements and sever estate complexities.

The hardware is robust and of a high quality. The chances of failure are quite low. However, if you are very worried about meeting very high availability levels then you need to run an "N + 1" topology/environment.

Capacity based, and traditional based, licenses cannot be used/mixed in the same one/single NetBackup "domain" (aka one/single backup environment).

[hytham_fekry]

Thanks for the reply ... 

Now , as i have budget for two options , performance wise , will it make a significat difference in performance if i  took off the load of master server role from the netbackup appliance ... 

Also , as we gonna have capacity license anyway , can we just remove old license and install new capacity based license "on old master server" , so we can keep old configurations and policies ?

[DaveM16]

HI Hytham

I agree with SDO's comments, but will add that you should consider the long term challenges of implementing this way.

The addition of the MSDP storage pool on the master makes the eventual replacement of the appliance (in 3-5 years) much more problematic.

A better solution in my opinion is to deploy either a virtual or physical separate master.
The advantage of the virtual master is the relatively simple DR/HA options you have, the
disadvantage is that you will not be able to attach tape drives to the master (robot control via network sure, just not fibre).

As for the license - absolutely remove the old licenses and deploy the new capacity based license key on the existing master,
that way the appliance will simply be a new media server in your environment and there will be minimal changes required.
In fact removing the old licenses is optional and not required. Be sure to add the new licenses though,
as they may unlock new features that the old licenses haven't enabled.

[sdo]

You could have an N5230 without additional disk shelves and run that as a master server only, but budget wise this could turn out to be an expensive master server, but does lock away all the 'administration' around OS, HBA etc, and also removes any 'requirements' that running a virtual master would place on your virtual infrastructure.  But if only a few media servers are being planned then maybe a 1U physical server would suffice as a master server (with fast 15k internal disk and a RAID BBU+cache).  But all this is down to sizing.

I'd be wary of making my recovery platform dependent upon the virtual infrastructure.  If availaibilty levels are high - then perhaps 2x1U physical servers in a cluster - plus N+1 media servers, i.e. such that you can tolerate any down time of any one media server when it comes to achieving backups.   Of course a down media server could impact ability to restore especially if the media server hosts MSDP.   But appliances with a four hour break fix can alleviate this somewhat.

One is not allowed to mix license types.  What you can do, is remove the old traditional licenses, and then add your capacity license.  When one has a capacity license, one adds that same one license key to all masters and media servers in an environment - and then regular use of nbdeployutil to keep an eye on actual notional consumption of this license usage.  There is nothing to stop you going over your usage allowance/license - so be sure to implement regular recording of levels, and reporting to management so that license uplift discussions can take place to achieve best pricing before you need them.

[mnakhan]

Enterprise solution in telco or Oil & Gas company, for best practice and load balancing you use master server and Media server separately.(PR-Site & DR-Site).  

Licensing model: for host based licenseing you have to talk with your vendor, vendor talk with Veritas represnatator to adjust the hostbased licensing financial impact in a capacity based licensing model (get financial benifit)