Migrated from 5.1 to 6.5 using different servers...

[Omar_Villa]

Hi,

        I want to know someone's opinion on this, we have migrated from an old Solaris 9 Server with NBU 5.1 to a new box Solaris 10 6.5, we didnt perform the upgrade because is huge environment and even Symantec strugle with this without a successful answer, so we find out that was better to migrate all the clients to a different box and change the bp.conf configuration on the clients, all this is done and is running great, the issue now is with the restores, we will not be able to directly restore from the old 5.1 environment to the clients because this ones now are 6.5, we have been thinking on multiple solutions, but still not sure which one can work in the best.

Sol 1.

Attach a NAS to the 5.1 master and perform any old restore there and let the clients connect to this NAS

Sol 2.

Migrate the old 5.1 to 6.5 now that is not that critical.

Sol 3.

Live like it is and due alternate restore and then the client can copy that info, which will increase the RTO.

Pleae let me know your opinions.

Regards

[J_H_Is_gone]

I am kind of in the same boat.  here is what I did.

I got my new master and medias at 6.5. 

But I left all of my clients at 5.1

I kept my old master which is 5.1 and put some standalone drives on it just so I could do restores which turned it into a media as well.

Here is where we my differ - how long is your  longest retetion in the catalog.

I have no tapes at infinity.

the most I have are 6 months in the catalog. ( anything longer then that is indexed and stored for 7 years, but allowed to expired in the catalog.  so if I have to do a restore I have to import the tape first.  I don't have to do this very often).

so because after 6 months I will not have to restore from the 5.1 master, I am just waiting for the 6 months to be up.  Then I will get rid of the old mater and upgaded all my clients.

with this method I can restore from the old and from the new to the clients.

I just have to wait for a few more months before I upgrade the cleints to 6.5.

any new client is getting installed at 6.5 because I will not have to do restores from the old setup.

[Omar_Villa]

You know this was the best option for what I see, unfortunally we already upgrade the clients, so we are stuck on this, but will be good for any future reference.

thanks man.

[pkunk]

ah, that reminds me that I have to upgrade 5.1 to 6.5 as well. My approach is pretty much the same, just to be on the safe side.  Get a new box, install 6.5 and copy over the policies from 5.1, that way you have a fresh new catalog.  As far as restoring, maybe you can convince the user if they really need the restore. 
Not sure if you backing up windows or unix but if you have snapshots in the (client) filers you are backing up that will save you the trouble of shutting down the new box and re-wiring the cables back to the 5.1 to restore.  A good retention policy should help, knowing that your catalog size should not grow more than 1 TB.
ex:
daily - 1 month
full - 6 months
monthly - 6 months
catalog - infinite

[nox]

weird that they didn't work with you to do an upgrade. I installed 5.0 on a new server, restored catalog, ran it for 2 weeks and then upgraded to 6.5.1. Kept the same name, catalog was intact. I think looking back I could of upgraded on the old servers and it could of handled it. Restores work, much easier than just installing a new server...

[J_H_Is_gone]

We went froma window master to a unix master.

so we tried to put the 5.1 on unix and then upgrade.

but even with consulting on site they could not move it from windows to aix.

I eneded up with a bit of a mess on my new master had to clean up a lot of image and volume issues.

and ended up with an old master and a new master, which I could have done myself.

it just depends on how long you have to wait for ALL of your old tapes to expire.

[James_TS]

Sorry to dredge up an old thread, but I am currently working on migrating our NetBackup 5.1MP6 installation from an older server to a newer one.  As this is a production environment, I want to make sure I've got it right.

For now, I am looking to migrate the Master Server only, as we are getting to a point where the image database is getting too large for the disk space on the old server.  Ultimately I would like to migrate the media server to the new system as well.  (Hook the tape library up to the new system.)  I've been searching the forums and reading threads, and it looks like the pertinent requirements are:

bp.conf (both machines)
------------------------
Make sure to have a SERVER entry for both the old and new servers.
Make sure to have a FORCE_RESTORE_MEDIA_SERVER = oldserver newserver

 

vm.conf (both machines)
------------------------
Make sure to have a SERVER &  DEVICE_HOST entry for each server (old and new).
Make sure to have a FORCE_RESTORE_MEDIA_SERVER = oldserver newserver

Anything I'm missing?  Also, I'll say please don't point me to old posts, because half of my searching has led to the old Veritas forums which are apparently now defunct. I've researched extensively James Dunn and J.Hinchcliffe's posts.  I do believe it's possible to move to a new server using the database and catalogs from an old one.  I just need to make sure that I'm not missing anything in regards to this procedure.

I have rsync'd over the /usr/openv directory for now.  Do I still need to do a reinstall?  Or can I simply start the services?  The servers while very different in OS and hardware (Fedora 3.x and CentOS 5.1) the users/groups are the same.  (We use a universal user/group framework.)

Message Edited by James_TS on 07-14-2008 01:41 PM

[Omar_Villa]

Our solution for this will be migrate all clients to the new environment once is done we can try to upgrade the old master servers, merge them in a single catalog then we can merge it with the new environment, the process is complicated because of the DB size but without the production preasure will be little less complex, but is still a big effort for us. Left the old master has a museum server can be an other option, but the idea is to decom all this, now the main issue is with the API server has Lotus which is giving some restore issues, thats why I will recomend to migrate this client at the end and leave them has 5.1 in case you need to restore from your old box you will be able to do it, other way you will need to uninstall 6.5 client and agent and reinstall the old version which can be a pain in case of a critical restore has a SOX one.

thanks everyone for your help.

have a good day.