Gripes and asking for suggestions

[ruckc]

So my organization purchased NetBackup to manage our backups.  I have never used it before but am trying to implement it, and there are a few things that just don't make sense to me.  I was hoping that someone can correct me if I am wrong, or can lead me in a proper direction for a solution to my problems/gripes.

1) Managing exclude lists. When NetBackup was provided to me to install (two weeks after the support license expired, got to love bureaucracy), I installed it per the instructions and installed the clients, and in the java gui I was surprised to not find a way to manage exclude lists on groups of hosts, or setting up exclude lists on a Policy, or on the Individual clients. Then I read the documentation, and then I went and copied the exclude list to every client manually. This is something to me that should be common sense and I was quite annoyed that I have to manage this individually on every server. I imagine that people with hundreds of clients have other work arounds?

2) Backing up shared filesystems (and other shared resources). I have a SAN, between 2-42 clients mount the same disks from the SAN. Example, we have a shared /home mount point. Its presented to 42 servers. I don't want to backup home on every client every time, because that's a waste of backup storage. So from what the documentation says (or lack thereof) I need to create a separate policy naming one client of the 42 clients to backup /home. This poses an interesting problem. Say Murphy decided to come visit, and the backup of /home failed because the singular client didn't backup because of some random error. Then the next day human error happens, and we need to recover from the missing backup. Yes I could backup /home multiple times but that seems borderline retarded as shared resources has been around for years.

3) Emails. I love that NetBackup emails me letting me know about the status of my backup jobs. Can I get that in a digest form please. Lets see approx 4 backup locations per server, 42 servers, equals 168 emails assuming everything goes alright, per night.

4) Media Server. NetBackup's Media Server idea appears to be for environments where the backup storage is directly connected to the Media Server. What about the environments where the backup location is an NFS mount. Why do I need to copy all of my backups across the network twice, once to the media server, and second to the NFS server.

5) Storage Units. As mentioned above my backup storage is an NFS mount. I also have two types of servers, so I have two Policies not including the catalog policy. Can NetBackup automatically create directories and organize the backups in a "Disk" Storage Unit so that I don't end up with 10,000 files, 0 directories on my NFS mount. Yes I could create separate policies for each client, and point them at a different directory in the NFS mount, but then I would have to manage 42 policies instead of 2.

So far those are my only gripes, it seems that NetBackup is doing what it supposed to do, which is nice, but for a product that cost what we paid for NetBackup I expected quite a bit more. Has anyone encountered these issues before? How have you addressed them?

[J_H_Is_gone]

1 ) each server is unique – so the exclude list can be unique as well. You can use command line and scripting, or you can open more then one client properties at a time and add it to them at once. When adding a new server open the properties of the new server and a old server at the same time and apply the excludes from the old to the new.

2) Check out “Cross Mount Points”  or "Backup Network drives" if you have /home mounted on all the systems at once then do not check, this will then only backup drives that are local to that system. Just make sure you also backup the source server. If you want to back it up twice then go ahead – as to a failed backup and human error – I guarantee it will happen at some point.

3) the trick is to only get emails for failed jobs. Search this forum for threads on that there have been many. Also tech does like this one.
DOCUMENTATION: How to configure email notifications for Windows clients using BLAT and nbmail.cmd in Veritas NetBackup (tm)
seer.entsupport.symantec.com/docs/254809.htm

4 & 5 ) I don’t do disk backups so I cannot say a lot but I don’t think you got it quite right. It does not backup each file, but puts each file into the backup images on your storage unit. There is also an option called Fiber Transport that keeps everything on the san for backups.

Can someone who knows more about disk backups comment please.

[Stumpr2]

1) DOCUMENTATION: A method for centrally managing exclude and include list for UNIX and Linux clients under NetBackup 6.5.3.
http://support.veritas.com/docs/316533

2) Setting up email notifications about backups
http://support.veritas.com/docs/316347

3) NFS?? I don't understand what you mean when talking about NFS for #2,4,5??

The data should be backed up from where it physically resides. It should also be restored to where it physically came from.
The only time that I have backed up via NFS is when the client platform/OS was not supported by Netbackup.
For instance I have exported HP-UX 9 filesystems to an HP-UX 11 server so that the supported HP-UX 11 server could mount it and be used to backup the non-supported HP-UX 9 client.

[ruckc]

1) This was more of a gripe about why are you (symantec) giving me a GUI to manage the clients when I still have to go into each server and manage it for the exclude list, instead of from a central location (the java gui).

2) I have Cross Mount Points unchecked, and the /home is a SAN disk.  But the media servers do not have an HBA to mount /home locally.  The filesystem on it is OCFS2 so there is no "source" server for it, all of the clients share it.  So I was more just wanted the ability to have it backup home from one client, if that fails for some reason, it then "fails over" and backs it up from another client.

3) Thanks I will look that Document up.

[ruckc]

1 & 2) Whoo hoo documentation, thanks.

3) NFS, my backup destination, disk, the place where all my backups go is an NFS mount.  The device that owns the NFS mount is a Data Domain Deduplication Device (allows for nightly full backups without wasted space).  So currently the media servers mount the Data Domain appliance to store the backups, i was inquiring about if it was possible to have the clients backup instead of to the media server then to the Data Domain, just directly to the data domain NFS mount (to minimize shipping the data twice across the network).

Also, as for the backing it up from where it physically resides, I wish I could, but most of our data resides on the SAN, and my only means of backing it up is via the clients attached to it.

[Will_Restore]

Is this what you're talking about?  Don't you just back it up directly on the media server instead of NFS mounting it on a host and doing a network client backup?
http://www.datadomain.com/pdf/Veritas-NetBackup-and-DataDomain.pdf

[John_Stockard]

You could backup each client directly to the NFS export on the Data Domain, but then you'd need a potload of additional NetBackup licenses (one NetBackup Enterprise Client license for each one of your client machines instead of a NetBackup Standard Client license).  This would turn each one of your regular NetBackup clients into their own media server.  It would make your backups slightly more efficient (the data would take one hop across the network to get to the Data Domain) instead of two hops (from the client to the media server, then from the media server to the Data Domain), but administering this in the NetBackup Admin GUI would be a royal pain (you'd have one storage policy for each one of your clients, since each client would be it's own media server).

One way to cut down on the amount of pain associated with having your data make two hops across the network is to create a separate LAN (or VLAN) for the link between the media server and the Data Domain.  This way the media server isn't trying to use one NIC (or one NIC team) for both ingesting the client data and expelling it out to the Data Domain.

You should also keep in mind that you (or your management) should have purchased a sufficient quantity of the NetBackup "Enterprise Disk Option" licenses in order to legally backup data to your Data Domain appliances.  The NetBackup software is not going to complain if you don't have these licenses, but your department might get dinged with an expensive and unexpected expense if Symantec does a license audit.