Question Regarding nbpushdata

[subhojit_pal]

Hi,

My master is 6.5.1 HP-UX 11.11

I have 22 media servers(20 HP-UX & 2 Windows 2003). I had upgraded all media servers to 6.5.1 except the 2 Windows one which are still at 5.1 MP5. I was not able to upgrade these 2 with other media servers as I did not have the correct version of LibAttach software.

So, I ran nbpushdata -modify_5x_hosts but as they have over 10,000 tapes assigned to them each, the command took over 24 hrs to complete which resulted in an extended outage.

My question is when I am going to upgrade these media servers, will the nbpushdata -add command will take the same time as the modify_5x_hosts command?

Thanks,

Subhojit.

[F_J · Accepted solution]

If you have already run nbpushdata -modify_5x_hosts, there is no need to run nbpushdata -add after the upgrade. The mediaDB data is already pushed out to the EMM database. You only need to re-run the device configuration wizard after upgrading to update the device database.

[subhojit_pal]

Thanks FJ,

So, what you are saying is that I only need to delete the tape drives & robot and re-add them? Will that be the only thing I need to do ?

Thanks again.

Subhojit.

[F_J]

Correct.

[dami]

That's an interesting question. Looking at the command reference for nbpushdata, it appears that the

-modify_5x_hosts option does create new EMM db entries for all media from the old files voldb and mediaDB and also creates *.tpacbak or *.bak files for mediaDB, robotic_def and ltidevs files (the first one of which if it is a copy and not a rename will also consume a lot of time). Once the media and other info have been imported to EMM, the old 5.x media server is set as NOT_DATABASE_HOST and it will use the new EMM databese for its 10,000 volumes.  This makes sense because v6 and above NetBackup cannot read the old voldb and mediaDB databases.

Also what I cant see anywhere in the documentation is the steps to finally upgrade the 5.x media servers (as in this case) when they have been running for a while in this back-compatible mode with a v6.x server. I would expect then that nbpushdata is not run again for them, but the server software is simply upgraded.

From this I would hazard to guess that when you finally do upgrade these servers to 6x that it will not take as long because the media will already be in EMM. Any Symantec gods out there care to confirm or disagree with this? Cheers