Hi Folks -
Trying to come up with a solid plan for upgrading from NBU 6.5.6 to 7.1, due to the fact that we're (hopefully) moving to Exchange 2010 sometime soon.
I've gone through the SORT and all the documention I found there but still have a number of questions. Am hoping some of you out there can assist!
Our current setup is pretty simple -- a single Master/Media server running Windows 2003 Standard R2 w/ SP2. This machine has our tape library and a 25-disk 2.5" SAS disk shelf (HP MSA70) hanging off it. Additionally, it has dual-port fiberchannel and iSCSI adapters in it for doing LAN-free backups of various NTFS + VMware VMFS volumes.
The question is this -- what's the most graceful way for us to upgrade? Since 7.x requires a 64-bit OS, a fresh install of Windows (we'll use 2008 R2) is obviously in-order. Preserving our current catalogs, naturally, is our big concern. If we have to re-create all of the policies, then so be it. That's not a big deal.
We've talked about just buying a new set of local disks and doing the install there, rather than overwrite the old ones -- simply, so we have an easy back-out plan should something go horribly wrong.
From looking at some documentation, it sounds like you can't restore 6.x catalogs on a 7.x server. This begs the question.. would we do the OS installation then install 6.5.6, restore the catalogs, test backup/restores, then upgrade to 7.1?
Any guidance here would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks!
-Craig
