Failover Netbackup Server

[NHL]

Hi

Netbackup 6.5.5 on RHEL5.2 .

I have my primary netbackup server that does all our backups.
I also have a failover backup server that will be used if the primary fails.

Does anyone know of any decent documentation on how I should set up the failover server ?

I have questions such as 

How do I get the catalog onto the failover ? Can this be automated ?
Do I need to import the tapes ? - how ?

Any documentation on this would be much appreciated,

Thanks
Nick .

[Christoph_Linde]

Nathan, you are wrong.

1. You only need a normal Enterprise Server Licensing for a failover NetBackup MasterServer. This is different for Failover Media Servers, but this is not the topic.
2. The best way is to use any form of clusters. Read the NetBackup High Availability Guide and the Cluster Compatibility List for supported Clusters.
3. You should use SAN Storage, so that you can use and mount the disks on two servers.
4. You can setup a Manual Cluster (without any cluster software), so that you shift over the disks, setup a IP address, and then startup the master in the failover node. This is what a cluster will do automatically for you.

The last and easiest option is:

Setup another server, similar to the primary server. This can be done by cloning the boot disk and booting the second server from a (previous created) copy. Then you start Netbackup without any Catalog information. Use Catalog recovery to recover your complete NetBackup server. This will take some time, but after you recovered you catalog (some 10th to 100 GB), you will be up and running again. This method is called cold standby and you clone your original machine. So everything is the same from hostname to IP address, so that NetBackup will run fine.

All of the mentioned methods do not require to import any tapes.

WARNING!
Do never ever only copy /db/images directory. Without your EMM database you will overwrite all your good images on Tape.!

[Marianne]

Have a look at this WhitePaper written by Alex Davies:

http://eval.symantec.com/mktginfo/enterprise/white_papers/b-whitepaper_implementing_highly_available_dr_with_veritas_netbackup_01_08_13599373.pdf

[NHL]

Thanks all

I will read through the info and no doubt have further questions later.

I have to admit that out backup server is NOT a dedicated backup server, the primary backup server also runs a production oracle database server while the failover backup server runs the oracle standby database, not ideal I know ...

Thanks for your help so far,

Nick .

[Nathan_Kippen]

Thanks Christoph for the correction



 

[Christoph_Linde]

That is not ideal, yes. I would say it is against what you want to achive.

If your production server fail, your master server is also gone. Then you want to fiddle around with netbackup to get it up and running on the failover server in exactly that moment, when you want to restore the production database on the failover server? It really sounds not a good idea

1. To do exactly this
2. To use Production application servers as backup servers.

Please do yourself and your company a favor and buy a server. And remember if anything fails, it is allways the fault of the backup administrator. It is never the fault of your boss.

[NHL]

Hi Christoph

yes I mentioned all this to the boss a while ago, but he seems to have conveniently forgot about it.
I will speak to him again, I think the minimum change we should make is move the tape library over to the non prod site and run the backups to there.
As for a dedicated backup server, more chance of me winning the lottery I'm afraid :)

Thanks for your help,
Nick .