migration to appliance

[Riadh_R17]

Hi,

Hope you all doing well.

We have an old solution netbackup master 7.7.3 on solaris sparc server with 4 medias.

The new solution installed is a netbackup appliance 5250, netbackup version is 9.0.

The customer asks if it is possible to migrate a part of backups to the new solution (appliance) and keep the rest with the old one.

In this case, what will be the workaround? 

Thank you in advance for your clarifications.

[quebek]

Hey

What do you mean parts of backup? Current clients? Or already made backups? If second one where backups were written to? Disk or tape? if disk - what kind of storage server was used?

If to tapes - read about importing backup images here 

https://www.veritas.com/support/en_US/article.100017201#:~:text=NetBackup%20media%20may%20be%20impor....

If it is about to move clients to new NBU domain - it should be easy. Create for these clients policies on new one as these were on old (of course storage units will be different), add in old NBU domain to these client new master/media server into servers for these clients... than I would upgraded the clients and make the newly added master as master ;)

[Riadh_R17]

Hi @quebek 

Thank you for your answer.

can you explain more clearly these steps ?

If it is about to move clients to new NBU domain - it should be easy. Create for these clients policies on new one as these were on old (of course storage units will be different), add in old NBU domain to these client new master/media server into servers for these clients... than I would upgraded the clients and make the newly added master as master ;)

Thank you in advance

[quebek]

Hello

I am not sure what is unclear there... Please read NetBackup Admin guide part 1 and you should know what to do.

These are the basics NBU administration tasks. Can you perhaps be more specific?

[StoneRam-Simon]

It is possible to do many different things but we do need to have a better understanding of what is is that you are asking.  (NetBackup migrations, is all I do!!  and  I've been doing them for more than 13 years).

Partial migrations can mean many different things depending on who is reading it..

it can mean migrating just policies, 

it can mean migrating just legacy images on tape (in which case media import is possible)

it could mean moving individual clients, and their policies, and images, and other related configuration.

If you are looking to migrate everything related to a given client, you need to prepare for such a migration by moving all associated images, and policies to use on of the media servers and make sure that any disk or media is not shared with other clients that are not being migrated. 

If a partial migration, requires you to also move media servers or storage you will need to make sure that post migration these components can be upgraded to a supported version for the destination (in your case something that is supported by 9.0).

If you can elaborate a little more to state what the desired end result should look like, myself (or others) may be able to give a more defined response as to how to achieve it.

[Riadh_R17]

Hi @StoneRam-Simon 

Thank you for your answer

knowing that we only work with hosts files (no DNS), after wholy migration of the catalog from old master to new master

is it possible to let the two masters turning on ?

we think editing hosts files of some clients to point to the new master. is it possible ? or we should point all clients to new master ?

for example:

Client A and client B are using the old master, is it possible that after migration of catalog,  we keep client A running with old master and just edit the hosts file of client B to use the appliance as its new master?

Sorry if i wasnt clear.

And thank you for your time and for your explanations

[davidmoline · Accepted solution]

Hi @Riadh_R17 

Firstly the catalog migration from your existing master to the appliance a complex task typically which can only be done by Veritas consulting (although @StoneRam-Simon may also have a method). 

As for the remainder of your questions:

• Yes you could run both masters at once (although it would not be recommended and could get confusing).
• If you have migrated the catalog, then why do you need the old master running anymore? 
• What is your intention for the old media servers - a media server can only be attached to one master server?
• Using hosts files instead of DNS for this purpose again would work, but I can see challenges around making sure the hosts file on a particular server is using the correct entries.

What is your actual goal - why do you want to keep the old master server running? Will you be upgrading this to a supported NetBackup version? If you do a complete catalog migration, there should be no reason to keep the old master running (and the existing media servers can be moved to the new master as part of the migration).

David

[Riadh_R17]

Hi @davidmoline 

Thank you for your time and for your clear and helpful answer :)

The final goal is to run the new master (appliance) only, but as for some reasons, the customer couldnt switch all his hosts to new master actually. 

for the medias they keep running with the old master now.

Thank you a lot :)

[StoneRam-Simon]

Catalog migrations don't have to be complex, although what you are looking for would be making it so...

I wouldn't recommend having the same Catalog contents in two different places (with the exception of AIR, with replicated images so they act independently of the origin ).

What you describe is more of a split, as there would be little point in having the new Appliance knowing anything about the Images / Clients that it is not serving, and it would cause issues from a catalog clean-up perspective if the same storage is also configured in both environments.

Tape media should only be managed by one backup environment, if the same media is used by multiple environments it can result in accidental dataloss

Disk based backup (Basic Disk and Advanced Disk) also need to be managed from one environment as they too can result in data loss if he wrong master does a cleanup activity for an image that has been managed differently in the other.

OST (MSDP, Puredisk, Quantum DataDomain etc) have some abilities to be configured in multiple environments, but this would NOT be recommended as it can also result in cleanup activities removing image data that is being used elsewhere..

So if you want to perform a split you need to re-organise the data onto specific storage devices before you do the catalog migration activities.  This will ensure that when the split is complete you have a situation where images are only managed by a single master.

If you are only looking at a "temporary" parallel running then its even more important that you don't have the SAME images in both as it will make merging the environments more difficult if that is what the end goal is!!

The above was / is true where the migration is being done using Professional Services / Catman.

We have a different approach to migrations, that is based on moving data at its component level with near ZERO downtime.  Tranzman takes much of the complexity out of a migration by being automated.  You define some rules and then Tranzman does the rest, synchronising the environments until you are ready to switch over. 

Using Tranzman you can easily select just the components you want to migrate.