Major problems with Netbackup 6.0mp2. Need insight please.

[Sbadmin]

Since I'm not having one specific issue I'm going to list them all and ask for some direction in this matter. Thanks in advance for any replies. 

Windows 2003 server (Only have one server with app MASTER).   4 fiber drives on SUN L500. LTO3


Frozen media - 12 of 52 tapes.
1 of 4 drives actually working.  Netbackup show's them as GOOD. Windows OS is the same too. 
Queued jobs will just sit there and never actually run.
The drive that does work. Jobs on this drive are taking 3x as long as they use to finish. Sometimes they don't finish at all.  A simple Catalog backup took almost 2days.
The netbackup services that are set to Automatic. A few won't start. Even with manually starting them the netbackup APP won't run. I have to keep trying and trying. 
A lot of DNS type issues too. Where as the Netbackup app won't work with "servername" but will work with "servername.suffix".  Then some days it's vice versa. ARGH!!!!

So obviously i'm having some issues and i've tried a ton of different things to fix them all. Some things with success (for a while anyhow) and some with no success. At this point i'm thinking about hiring consultant or setting up a new server and reinstalling from scratch. Problem with the latter is i'm not 100% sure whats going to happen with my old backups and polices etc. I'm backing up 4-5 TB a week with 50 or so polices. I'm just not sure what to do next.  Any direction to take would be great.  

Thank you very much,

Sbadmin

[Will_Restore]

fix network problems -- Netbackup does run well with a bad network!

review Windows Event Viewer for errors and determine how to resolve them

review netbackup media logs to determine why media was frozen and fix that


chances are, after all that, things will be much smoother


oh, and update to MP7 -- it's been out for quite a while

[Andy_Welburn · Accepted solution]

Incorrectly configured drives (i.e. which drive the O/S thinks NetBackup is referring to isn't the the drive NetBackup is referring to!!) - drive serialisation.

If incorrect can result in many frozen tapes & downed drives.

Does the drive configuration match that of the media/storage units etc wrt density (HCART, HCART3 etc) - if the drives are not down, there must be some reason they're not being used. Maybe Storage Unit config - max number of concurrent drives?

As Bill says "divide & conquer" - don't think of this as one error, take it a piece at a time: network, name resolution, configuration, media, hardware.

[Sbadmin]

I updated the software to 6.0 mp7 which seem to fix quite a few issues.   I also updated to the latest drivers for my HBA , NIC and Library storage device.  I made some tweaks in the global attributes section etc.  Over all this seemed to help and all 4 drives are working now as well as queued jobs running as normal.   I still need to deal with the frozen media issue.    Thanks to the above posters for your info. It helped me a lot. 

Thanks

Sbadmin