Help needed in moving NB servers physically

[Bharani_B]

Hello All,

Need your help in transitioning a small project.

This is a small transition project which I thought of taking your help here :

Whats moving

Site A: NB master server + NB Appliance box 5230 (also a media server) is moving to Site C

Site B: NB media server + NB appliance box 5230 (also a media server) is moving to Site D

Site A and C are Production domains

Site B and D are Non production domains here

That’s it all !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Now, let me take you back again to what happened and come back. My company won the bidding project or their company lost the bidding what ever we call and my company (Consulting company) got a deal of Million dollars for this project to handle within my company domains.

Means above said 2 servers + 2 appliance boxes should move from their domains and physically move to our Dataceneters and settle down.

That’s it.

Isit it simple for backup parts?

I see here no need to reconfigure things like master server software, media server software and no catalog recovery too as they are straight away getting from Prod domain to Prod domain here (Site A to Site C) and from Non prod domain there to Non prod domain here (Site B to Site D).

Now all I need to take care is physical connections and things I should be upfront in knowing what steps to do before they move from there and rack them up here.

My questions as of now:

They are not allowing us to login to current existing setup and check somethings like how plugged in NIC cards at OS end, how appliance got its physical connectivity and all these things as they are angry as this project is moving or they don’t want to support such project which is going to another consulting company. So, I was asked by my management to list down all those things I needed to ask them in single webex session which is going to happen after few days. So,I need experts help really for below questions.

• Do we have any docs assisting me in this regard with Veritas already?
• What are the steps that I should take care before moving from Sites A and B? (like catalog backup and what else)
• How do I check physical connectivity of NB master server and NB media server? (like I want to know what cables got connected and what cable is being used for what purpose by Netbackup?)

I think ipconfig /all gives us NIC card output. Any better idea and extra commands here?

• How do I check physical connectivity of NB appliances there? And is there a way that I can check what port is used for what function? Any command like such?
• I want to know what liceses they are currently using. How do I get that list? Is there any command for it?

This is because we need to procure those licenses also as like they are using and they are so unsupportive that are not telling us licensing also. So, I am figuring out to find myself.

• The 2 appliances are having replication. So, do I need to take care of any extra things here in knowing something before they move? Like replication ports in rear view of appliance or from network end (in OS end)?

I hope by now you come to know what all the things I am looking for and if you think, you really can help I rquest you please take out your precious and valuable time which helps me. This will also serve as ref doc for many in future I think and for starters in Netbackups, these answers will be GOLD I think as I know that cloudy phase of NB admins when we were asked to work on just Run projects and not on these kind of physicals taking.

[sclind]

Is Netbackup currently being run by another consulting company or by the customer?  Who is refusing to give you information?

[Bharani_B]

Another consulting company

[sclind]

I think then you need to go to the client company and let them know what info you need.  It belongs to them not the other consulting company. 

The other consulting company should provide you the info about logonids, etc. But they dont owe you any information on how to make the transistion  successfull.

[vtas_chas · Accepted solution]

If you've got a Veritas partner manager or account manager / SE pair, there's a workaround you could use.  If you don't, you may be able to get support to help you with some of this same technique, assuming the company has current maintenance.  You can also do this manually but it'll take some time to parse through the data.

Since you're talking about an appliance, run a DataCollect.  You can get all that configuration data on the appliance via that mechanism.  Support has a tool to help quickly analyze that data and I think they'd send you an output from that which would pretty it up (can't promise that since I'm not in support, but you could ask).  At a minimum you could get an understanding of the full config of the appliance.  It isn't clear to me if the master server is a separate box or not so if it's not an appliance you might consider an nbsu.  You'd have to wade through the data but it would give you some idea of what's going on.

This isn't going to give you NBU data, but it should give you a good place to start.

Your biggest challenge here is going to be reconfiguring the network and hostnames.  You can't reconfigure a hostname without a factory reset.  Network can be reconfigured pretty easily if you have IPMI configured, which you could either do prior to shutdown and move or in the BIOS when you get it to the new DC and powered up.

I'd get the account team involved and ask for their help with an nbdeployutil analysis if you've got needs for licensing.  It'll be the cleanest and easiest way to make sure it's right.

There's a lot to think through here with clients, hostnames, DNS, etc.  There's no doc from Veritas that's going to walk you through all of that.  Anything that exists is going to be intellectual property of the consulting organization, because they get paid to do this sort of thing.