NBU 6, MP4 expreiences so far?

[Tim_Wilkinson]

Hi,

I'd like to know what experiences people have had with MP4. I've deployed in on most hosts on our site and so far so good. However, some of the hosts have to follow more strict change&config processes.
Any feedback (especially Exchange 2003, Oracle, SQL, Sharepoint, etc,) would be useful.

Cheers,

Tim

[James_Stahl]

We applied MP4 yesterday and the only problem we have seen is this message appears in "All Log Entries" every 10 minutes. There is 1 entry for every server.

11/28/20061:34:18 PMDWDMADBSP008Error0General
backup of client ASPUIMG, policy ASPUIMG, is suspended: exceeded configured number of tries for a schedule


If this is the only problem I will be glad. I am hoping nothing else shows up.

[Chuck_Stevens]

I just finished rolling out MP4 to our environment. No issues so far...

[Peter_Ganthavor]

No problem here.

[Gerald_W__Gitau]

I have just upgraded the master server to MP4 and the Enterprise Media Manager service has refused to start. Any ideas??

[Gerald_W__Gitau]

Just figured it out. I re-applied MP4 and then rebooted the server. Everything is fine now. That was one sweaty hour!

[Tim_Wilkinson]

Reapplying MP4 you say?

We've got one SAN media server that is playing up after MP4. everything else is working fine. Perhaps reapplying MP4 might fix my issue as well - to be honest I hadn't thought about that as Symantec support never suggest anything of this nature (their solutions are generally more technical than that but worth a try).

Cheers,

Tim

[Gerald_W__Gitau]

Try it and let me know if it works for you.

[Lance_Hoskins]

MP4 is a must have. We just went to a holiday brunch with Veritas/Symantec and the number of fixes and time/effort put into making MP4 is makes it a must have. If you haven't upgraded to 6.0 yet, hold off until January when they have a new install disk with 6.0 MP4 all in one. "Go red team, go!!"

Lance

[Chuck_Stevens]

First problem; see this thread:

http://forums.symantec.com/discussions/thread.jspa?threadID=69672&tstart=0

[Dennis_Strom]

I agree with Chuck. MP4 may have quite a few fixes. The base issue though is the fact that 6.0 is not ready for production. To many people are having critical problems and either having failed backups or late nights. I think staying at 5.1 is still the solution. My current install is 6.0 MP3. I will be upgrading one non-critical system to MP4. I am unwilling to upgrade the rest of my install to MP4 after all the problems I have encountered going to 6.0 MP3 from 5.1.

I will not upgrade my second site from 5.1 to 6.0 because it is currently running fine and I do not want the administrative headache that comes with 6.0. I will be going to a Symantec dog and pony show Wednesday and will not them know that I am unhappy with their current release of Netbackup.

[Tim_Wilkinson]

I did reapply MP4 yesterday and the backup ran fine last night.

However, I also changed the backup selection from A_L_D to explicit drive letters (it may be possible that one of the 'other drives' was causing the issue). At the moment I'm not sure which change fixed the problem but will be testing with A_L_D again next week to find out.

This was the first valid backup since 30/11 so I'm pretty happy and in no hurry to change anything just yet ;)

[Thomas_Leveille]

I have strange problems since I installed the mp4 (mp3 was worse though). It looks like nbpem fails sometimes to communicate with the emm database.

-nbpem exit sometimes in the middle of the night. It happened last night and I can see this in the logs :

12/13/06 20:09:53.585 (startEvaluation) Evaluation triggered(BPCRConnFactory.cpp:1137)
12/13/06 20:10:00.017 CORBA system exception: TIMEOUT (IDL:omg.org/CORBA/TIMEOUT:1.0) -- 1413547326 1 -- system exception, ID 'IDL:omg.org/CORBA/TIMEOUT:1.0'
TAO exception, minor code = 3e (timeout during send; low 7 bits of errno: 62 Timer expired), completed = NO

12/13/06 20:10:00.017 V-116-11 nbpem exiting - failed to get last backup information from database

And sometimes the manual backups do not start, telling me this : "EXIT STATUS 230 - the specified policy does not exist in the configuration database"

And it looks like it is the very same problem :
12/14/06 09:28:55.870 (startEvaluation) Evaluation triggered(BPCRConnFacto
ry.cpp:1137)
12/14/06 09:29:21.531 CORBA system exception: TIMEOUT (IDL:omg.org/CORBA/TIMEOUT:1.0) -- 14135
47326 1 -- system exception, ID 'IDL:omg.org/CORBA/TIMEOUT:1.0'
TAO exception, minor code = 3e (timeout during send; low 7 bits of errno: 62 Timer expired), completed = NO
(JobScheduler.cpp:5501)
12/14/06 09:29:21.531 V-116-63 failed to get policy information from database
12/14/06 09:29:21.532 V-116-14 CLIENT NONE POLICY DATA-UNIX-01H SCHED D-INC_DATA-UNIX-01H EXIT STATUS 230 (the
specified policy does not exist in the configuration database)

The master server is on Solaris 9.

[dslam24]

Don't Install MP4 if you are running DFS on any of your servers. It will error out when running System State backups. In Windows Server 2003

[Hassell_Stacy_2]

I saw the same message in my log. I changed the setting on the master host for the number of retries in the number of hours to fix it.

Host Properties - Master Server - Global Attributes - Schedule Backup Attempts
Tries Per Hour

[Hassell_Stacy_2]

I have two things that are happening on my master and media servers since my upgrade to MP4.

On one of masters, I get "ping of NBJM failed, communication lost". It has happened twice around 4 am and it stopped operation of NBU. I have opened a case with Veritas but it has not happened since we started logging of -0 117.

The second problem is after a reboot of a media server the NetBackup Service Layer does not start yet after the master can see the media server the service will start.

[Dennis_Strom]

I am still on MP3.
My experience is much better since I stopped doing cold catalog backups. I only do hot catalog backups. This seemed to eliminate many of my emm database/pbx problems.

[Tim_Wilkinson]

Mauro,

Apparently there is a fix for this but I've yet to have it supplied to me (we have the same issue with our file server, although the system state probably isn't so important with that server so until fixed, I'm explicitly backing up drive letters).

Cheers,

Tim

[chad_hartman_2]

I opened a case with Symantec and they supplied the new nbbeclass.dll. This issue is supposed to be fixed in MP5. I was running MP4 on all of my clients except the one running DFS for a week with no issues.

http://support.veritas.com/docs/286954

[AKopel]

Yep, MP4 has been rock solid for us.
We do see the same Netbackup service Layer does not start on some media servers after a reboot, we have to start it manually...
AK