A plea to the Symantec Programmers and Engineers: FIX NetBackup 6.5.2!

[Jason_Voyles]

After a large rollout of 6.5.2A in our environment, we are left with over 15 “custom” binaries and multiple weeks of delays troubleshooting… For everyone out there considering NetBackup 6.5, Wait until 6.5.3! You will save yourself many headaches… Back to trying to find out why Life Cycle Policy duplication job won’t re-queue when a tape is in use and instead holds drive resources until the tape is avaiable. (A bug that is suppose to be fixed in 6.5.1!? Guh…)

[loco_nbu]

I upgraded to from 6.0 mp6 to 6.5 and have waited to put any patches on 6.5 because of all the issues I've seen on the forums. We are currently experiencing issues with our catalog and support is recommending we upgrade to 6.5.2a. I'm hesitant but I don't really have a choice. Does anyone know when 6.5.3 will be public?

[sdo]

Today I was told that v6.5.3 will be available at the end of November 2008 - but I didn't get that in writing.

[sdo]

Jason, the deadlock on resources is seriously hampering us too.  Last weekend I logged on and found thousands of SLP duplications behind a log-jam of several so called "active" duplications that had been waiting for resources for over 9hrs 45minutes - not good for the heart.  A quick cancel, and it all starts flowing again.

However, my sympathies also go out to Symantec - resource deadlocks are notoriously tricky things to code against.  I really hope that v6.5.3 includes some form of spin-locking at the lower levels of the resource broker, combined with reliable deadlock detection that does NOT kill a semi-pending semi-active duplication, but instead releases resources so that other jobs that can acquire all the necessary resources can and do continue - and I hope Symantec make such a timeout "value" a customer configurable option.