Slow Catalog restore on 6.0 MP3

[pyip]

Attempted to upgrade to 6.5 and failed.  Spoke to support and they suggested uninstalling, reinstalling 6.0 MP3 (where we were before the upgrade) and then restoring the from our hot catalog backup.  Once we're all up, retry the 6.5 install.

I uninstalled everything and am restoring the catalog and getting around 1000KB/Sec.  It fluctuates and sometimes goes up to 6000 max, but then will drop back down.  Our catalog size is ~147GB and resides on our SAN.  The LUN is presented to our server and that's how we're restoring it.  

I tested a catalog restore a couple of weeks ago on a virtual machine to test and it seemd a lot faster.  I think it only took 3 hours.  How fast is this process supposed to take?  The job has been running for 22 hours now and still going.  The current kilobytes written is getting close to the size of our catalog.  So it should be almost done, right?  

Also I was doing the restore from the catalog wizard.  I opened up another console to look at the Activity Monitor to see the speed and nbconsole.exe crashed and closed the wizard.  The job is still running right now, but is there any way to check what is going on?  Even if nbconsole.exe dies, should I still be ok as far as the restore goes?  Thanks in advance!

[Former_Mary_Kay]

From the command line use: bpdbjobs[.exe] -most_columns to see the job status.

What OS are you running on?

If you're going to uninstall and reinstall, why not do a fresh 6.5.2a install and then restore the catalog?

Message Edited by SJ Hollist on 10-01-2008 01:52 PM

[pyip]

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@SJ Hollist wrote:

From the command line use: bpdbjobs[.exe] -most_columns to see the job status.

What OS are you running on?

If you're going to uninstall and reinstall, why not do a fresh 6.5.2a install and then restore the catalog?

Message Edited by SJ Hollist on 10-01-2008 01:52 PM

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I was able to finally restore but it took a really long time.  Here is some more information.  The Hot Online Catalog Backup is on a SAN disk that is presented to the Master Server.  The catalog is ~147GB. I re-ran the catalog restore wizard on a virtual machine again last week and it finished a lot faster.  It was going around 10000 KB/Sec.  The virtual machine had local disks.  I copied the catalog backup files over to that server.  I'm wondering why it would be so much faster on a virtual server compared to a physical machine?  Both machines are on Windows 2003 Standard with SP2. 

And I did want to go to 6.5.2a but support told me that I should get back to 6.0 mp3 first and then run the upgrade again since our catalogs are from that version.  Also since the restore took over 24 hours to do, my boss was anxious to get the server back up as soon as possible.  Management didn't want to risk being down any longer if something went wrong when I install 6.5.2a and perform the catalog restore again.  

[Former_Mary_Kay]

I'm seeing an issue myself with restoring a catalog backup from SAN disk. It's not as slow as yours, but it is much slower then from LTO2 tape.  I wonder if there's some kind of issue to tuning that needs to be done with SAN disk for catalog recoveries...

[pyip]

Yeah I'm curious if there is a setting or config change needed.  I was considering copying it over to the local disk (which has plenty of space) but I think the .dr file has some information containing which drive the files were backed up to.  If it doesn't matter, I can try that again later.  But it's odd that I was getting 10x faster on my VM.  Instead of finishing the restore in a few hours, our company was down for over a day.  Management wasn't too happy about that. 

If anyone else has any experience with Hot Catalog Backups/Restores to SAN disks, that would be great.  I wanted to test it out but finding a machine to set uplike my master server would take a lot of work.  But eventually I will have to do it in order to try out the upgrade again.