Best Practice for Bring on a new media server.

[Learning_Everyd]

Environment:

1 NBU 6.5.6 Master

4 NBU 6.5.6. Media Servers

OS WIN2003 Ent. w/SP2

I have a media server on a older box that's starting to give me lots of NBU issues.  I have new hardware for my NBU 7.x upgrade, but that's not planned till Q2 of 2012.  Until then I'd like to go a head and replace the one with issues over to the new hardware.  I'm looking for best practice on how to bring one online as quickly as possible with as little downtime as possible. 

Any feed back or documentation much appreciated.

Thanks,

LE

[Mark_Solutions]

Probably the quickest and least troublesome way would be to just add the new one in as a new media server and decomission the old one - assignbing its images/tapes to the new one.

The decomission tool is useful for this:

http://www.symantec.com/docs/TECH125192

or follow this guide to do it for just changing to new hardware

http://www.symantec.com/docs/TECH77811

Hope this helps

[watsons]

You didn't tell us what kind of NBU issues you're seeing in old box, but I guess you're refering to something in OS or hardware level which causes application to not performing up to the par...

If you're just migrating hardware, the impact should be minimal.

If you're migrating hardware as well as OS (such as going to Windows 2008), you should be aware that 2008 may introduce some other OS requirement and changes, which may slow things down using NB7. The notorious one being the deduplication and performance. Get a test environment first (if you have time and resource) to work out possible issues before production deployment, that should save you more time and effort in the long run.

Mark has provided the technotes required.

[Marianne]

Are you backup devices shared (SSO) or dedicated? If shared, install and config new media server. Move client backups to new media server in a phased approach. This will give you failback to old media server in case there are 'teething problems'. Once all backups have been moved to new STU, use the docs provided in Mark's post to decommission the old media server. As per watsons post, carefully check compatibility guides.