Migrate catalogs form NBU5.1 (Unix) to NBU7 (windows)

[gosborne]

Hi,

We currently have an old installation of NBU5.1 on a solaris 8 server. We have implemented a new NBU7 environemnt on widows 64bit. Is there a way to import the 5.1 catalogs into the 7 environment? Fro  the forums I've read we need professional services, but on the course it was said to be easy to do this? We cuold always leave the old environment in place, but would prefer not to for the next 2 years.

Cheers,
Gawain

[AAlmroth]

In order to merge, you would have to upgrade the 5.1 domain to 7.0. This also means you would have to upgrade to Solaris 10 first (as NBU 7 only support Solaris 10 as server). If this is not possible, you could stage a NBU 5.1 domain in a virtual, say SLES 9 (64-bit), run bprecover to re-establish the catalog on the staging master, and then upgrade SLES to version 10/11, followed by NBU to 7.0 (as per documentation).

You would now be set to merge the two catalogs. But here is where the SYMC consulting comes into the picture, because depending on your setup, it may be required to use a custom tool to move EMM entries from the old master to the new master.

I think your safest bet is to contact SYMC and escalate this, and hopefully they will find a local partner in your area, that can do catalog merge.

/A

[Marianne]

Another option would be to start importing tapes during quiet times....

You could try the Recovery Without Import method (where the images are simply copied between master servers and tapes write protected and put into separate pool), but there is NO guarantee that it will work 100%.

I have personally tried this some time ago - backed up images folder into a tar file on the Solaris folder, used Winzip on Windows server to extract tar file. I could browse images and a couple of test restores worked fine. The very next day, the director's secretary needed a restore - that particular image was corrupt and we ended up importing the tape.

The moral of the story is: Either pay lots of money for a consultant to merge/migrate or import the tapes...

[AAlmroth]

Considering the complexity with this merge, I think that the import approach actually may be better. Two main benefits; your old domain keeps running, so any restore requests can be timely attented for old backups, and no work on upgrading etc the old domain. Once all tapes are "imported", and recovery been tested in new domain, you can power off the 5.1 domain.

The paper referred earlier has been updated by Alex Davies in 2008;
"Veritas NetBackup (tm) catalog recovery without importing tapes"
ftp://exftpp.symantec.com/pub/support/products/NetBackup_Enterprise_Server/263423.pdf

/A

[Ed_Wilts]

This is such a major change that I wouldn't even begin to attempt this as you've built it and I did a 3.4 Windows to Solaris migration.   Upgrading 5.1 to 7.0 is a big jump all by itself.  An architectural change for the catalog is another huge jump.  This is by no means easy.  You're working with multiple unsupported environments and the intermediate pieces are also unsupported.  Directly migrating from where you're starting to where you want to end up is not really an option - you will need at least one intermediate environment to get to - you'll need to get from 5.1 to 6.x on the same platform, then perhaps doing an upgrade to 7.0, and then finally the migration from Unix to Windows. 

If you don't have a lot of tapes, importing is the safest approach.  Start by importing the images that have the longest retention since by the time you're done, some of the other images may have already expired. 

I haven't had to do any tape imports myself but I've heard it can take a day per tape... 

You can weigh the costs of the migration versus the costs and risks of keeping the old environment around.  Alternatively, weigh the costs of not having those old backups at all - it's amazing what management may say is no longer required when they see the bill for upgrading/migrating it.

   .../Ed

[AAlmroth]

Since 6.x. the platform endianess is less of an issue, as EMM database in platform neutral. the image catalog should be ftp'd in binary mode, all other relevant directories should be ftp'd in ASCII mode, when moving from Unix/Linux to Windows. If compression is used on Unix/linux, all images must be decompressed prior transfer to Windows platform.

/A