Hi all, I have a question relating to VMWare and NBU. To give you some context, we currently have an NBU 5.1 MP6 environment, with one master/7 media servers and about 400 clients. It used to be 4 master/2 media servers but it was amalgamated to the single master multiple media model November last year - and another media server added last month. To complicate the issue a little further, the master server and one of the media servers reside in a different domain to the remaining media servers. It's a domain we don't have admin rights too either.
What I would like to do is start from scratch. The existing NBU environment is VERY messy. Everything I have read and heard anecdotely from Symantec is that you need a very clean environment to start off with if you intend to upgrade from 5.x to 6.x. We certainly don't have that! It's grown over the years (5 or 6) without a lot of standardisation and there are small things like some libraries setup to read the first 6 characters on labels and others reading the last 6 - you get the idea. This is a golden opportunity for us to start again and do it properly, dammit! (My prayers have been answered!!)
So my plan in a nutshell is to virtualise the existing master/media servers and rebuild the servers form scratch into a new environment, complete with new server names that reflect our new global standard, new policies, new volume pools - the whole box and dice. These details are yet to be worked out.
My question is this though, does anyone know if you can virtualise master/media servers and leave them disconnected from any devices and still be able to keep the services up and running (with no scheduled backups obviously) and continue to access restore information??
OR, does anyone have any thoughts on how else I could go about keeping legacy information from the old environment?
When I first thought about I thought 'no problem!', but then realised that if you don't have devices attached to media servers, you don't see the media servers. Does this mean that the volume dbases that reside on these boxes won't be up and running? The idea is to keep this system running on a single physical box using VMware to run several guest OS's purely for legacy restores ie. be able to determine what we have on tape, what tapes they are on then ship those tapes off to a company that can do the restores for us. Has anyone thought this one out, or even attempted something similar?
If so I would be greatful to your feedback/thoughts/concerns etc!
Cheers
