Veritas Tech Talks: Introducing NetBackup 8.1.2 – Live VOX coverage

[JustineVelcich]

Welcome to the live-coverage summary feed of Veritas Tech Talks, happening now on the VOX homepage.

Follow this discussion thread for episode summary highlights being shared from the 4-part video series. We will share an episode summary at the end of each show, as a new comment. We welcome your questions – the NetBackup team is ready on hand to answer!

[Marianne]

Hi @JustineVelcich
How do we ask questions?

I have ONE question:
Why was the GA date postponed by FOUR weeks?

[JustineVelcich]

EPISODE 1 – Introducing NetBackup 8.1.2: The best just got better
Host: Matt Miersen

1. Overview of NBU 8.1.2 | Abrar Hussain Dir. Product Management for NetBackup
   
   What’s coming in this latest release?
   • Simplified user experience for NetBackup for backup Administrators, and Workload Administrators (Delivering an end-to-end workloads-driven user experience)
     • Based on the top of our restful APIs for NetBackup and leverages role-based access control
     • The new web UI for NBU 8.1.2 provides the ability for customers to proactively manage how their capacity is being consumed à no scripts, everything available in real-time via their dashboard
     • New web UI focusing on starting with VMware, and Cloud workloads while existing java UIs will remain available and fully functional while we transition old interface into the new web UI (more workloads being added in the future)
   • Automation and Integration
     • New web UI based on new APIs we’ve built (publicly available) which customers can take those APIs and integrate their data protection tools into NetBackup
     • Customers can integrate NetBackup into ticketing systems (ex. ServiceNow)
     • Automatic client upgrade capabilities included
   • Modern Workloads support
     • Next generation workloads (ex. big data applications, hyperconverged environments, NoSQL DBs, etc.) – NBU 8.1 launched a scale-out framework that is designed for scale-out workloads
     • NBU 8.1.2 adds support for HBase, Azure stack and MongoDB (with more to come in the future)
     • Release Independent = download plug-in from our portal to protect their workloads at their own pace, don’t need to upgrade their entire environment
   • Modern Snapshot management
     • Our framework is release independent, and enables fast adoption of hardware platforms
     • On-prem snapshot management provided support for HP 3par, ACS, Unity and PureStorage – NBU 8.1.2 enhanced that snapshot to bring it to the cloud
     • Veritas NetBackup and Veritas Cloudpoint have come together and are now integrated with Google, Azure, and Amazon to leverage cloud-based snapshots to protect workloads deployed in cloud environments
   • Next generation data protection for VMware environments
     • 3 things available right away if using NetBackup Appliances:
       • Instant access to all VM backups
       • Single-file recovery for any file system (file system agnostic)
       • Agentless-based single-file recovery architecture
     • Outside of appliances:
       • Added support for XFS
       • Role-based access control to empower the VMware administrator
         
         

2. Overview of NBU 8.1.2 enhancements | Killian Evers, VP of User Experience
   
   What went on behind-the-scenes?

• Listened to our customer and our users, which helped us to create a common design strategy, centralized design organization, and the creation process of NBU 8.1.2
• The strategy behind the NBU enhancements:
  • Simple, easy to use
  • Intuitive, for users
  • Integrated, both within and outside of the product

[Glen_Simon]

Hello @Marianne. You are welcome to ask questions right here, just as you did.

In order to incorporate stakeholder feedback, Veritas will take some additional time to ensure that NetBackup 8.1.2 delivers seamless end-to-end user experience from release notification, to download, to upgrade, to management.

[JustineVelcich]

EPISODE 2 – Introducing NetBackup 8.1.2: Protect more data
Host: Matt Miersen

1. Modern application workloads | Abrar Hussain Dir. Product Management for NetBackup
   
   Define modern workloads.
   • NBU 8.1 delivered a modern workloads framework architecture; NetBackup parallel streaming is completely agentless and API-based technology (ex. You can leverage the APIs that Hadoop provides and protect your Hadoop environment, without putting agents on Hadoop.)
   • Scale-out framework designed for scale-out workloads, and is release independent
   • Supporting Hadoop, Nutanix, MongoDB, Azure stack
   • 1.2 introduces a parallel streaming SD kit.

2. Cloud workloads |   Karthik Ramamurthy, Sr. Dir. Product Management

What are some of the challenges customers face when moving to the cloud?

• Things to consider: going to a single cloud or multi-cloud, using the same tools that you had on-prem, in the cloud or new backup tools? Cloud vendors are not responsible to protect your data – the customer is responsible.
• Over 60% of customers use more than 1 cloud to manage their data, each cloud has their own snapshots: NetBackup simplifies this
• NBU 8.1.2 integrates with Cloudpoint that supports all modern and enterprise workloads running inside the cloud
• Support for multiple clouds: Amazon AWS, Azure, Google cloud 

[FULL DEMO TOUR CREATING A PROTECTION PLAN AS AN ADMIN] Dave High, Lead Principle Technical Education Consultant

3. VMware workloads |   Karyn Victory, Principle Solutions Engineer

What are the new capabilities specific to VMware?

• Instant Access to a VAM image:
  • Cracking the image open and access what we need, mounting the image on a media server without a client
  • Provide download links to an end-users instead of Admins needing to download, granular restores, full restores, etc.
  • Backup Admins can now delegate responsibilities to VMware Admins while still maintaining visibility and control
  • Instant Access does not replace Instance Recovery (you can use both solutions)
  • Instant access supports delegation, Instance Recovery still triggered by a Backup Admin
• VMware cloud on AWS:
  • Latest certification with vSAN allows us to protect VMware cloud on AWS
  • Protect VMware images/workloads on-prem and in the cloud
  • Have a similar capability across the hybrid clouds
  • All of these capabilities available in the new web UI for 8.1.2

[JustineVelcich]

EPISODE 3 – Introducing NetBackup 8.1.2: Empower your organization
Host: Matt Miersen

1. Overview of secure, self-service administration | Julio Rivera, Solutions Practice Manager
   
   What are we doing to empower workload owners?
   • Workload owners (VMware admin/DBAs) and key stakeholders now have access to their NetBackup environment like never before
     • Role-based access control gives workload owners access with limitations
     • Makes it easy to know the who, what, when of what’s going on in your environment
   • RBAC has 3 parts:
     • Users and groups
     • Permissions
     • Granular control
   • Benefits of RBAC:
     • Created canned roles: security admin, NetBackup admin, workload admin
     • Level of control with Mod-UX allows people with minimal training to start using NetBackup
   • NBU 8.1.2 is the first release of RBAC, additional functionality and new personas will be added with each release

[FULL DEMO TOUR ROLE-BASED ACCESS CONTROL] Dave High, Lead Principle Technical Education Consultant

2. Empowering Developers| Julio Rivera, Solutions Practice Manager and Karyn Victory, Principle Solutions Engineer
   
   What are we bringing to the developer community?
   • Unique opportunity to dive into what we offer to the development community around NBU
   • New release of over 40 APIs published to provide the development community the opportunity to automate and integrate
   • You can now integrate with ServiceNow catalogues
   • Gives the developer the capability to design something that meets their organizations needs 

3. Simplifying usage reporting and capacity planning with Smart Meter | Julio Rivera, Solutions Practice Manager and Karyn Victory, Principle Solutions Engineer
   
   Usage and trend reporting through 2 interfaces within NetBackup
   • Modernized UI: allows a view to see usage (pie charts, graphs, trend, etc), upper managers can proactively budget trends
   • VAM portal: new button called Veritas Smart Meter – linked to customer entitlement to show usage
   • Smart meter gives visibility and control to make data-driven decisions

[Marianne]

@Glen_Simon

Sincere apologies, but this reply is not doing it for me.

The Beta cycle for 8.1.2 has been exceptionally long, and GA now postponed for the second time.

#Dissapointed

[JustineVelcich]

EPISODE 4 – Introducing NetBackup 8.1.2: Planning your upgrade
hosted by MATT MIERSEN 

1. Planning your upgrade | Julio Rivera, Solutions Practice Manager
   
   What to think about when upgrading?

• Start with a tested upgrade plan, through a phased approach: Plan the upgrade, Upgrade time, Post-upgrade process
• Create advanced checklists for upgrades within NetBackup sort environment
• Check release notes—provides updated information about changes
• Document and test your plan
• Customers to are doing a “build your own” backup infrastructure (using their operating systems to deploy NetBackup masters and media servers) – when they do this, they have to test that stack which can take many months of testing
• NetBackup Appliances ensures that the OS, software and hardware all work together which minimizes testing
• For customers wanting a different infrastructure, we have virtual appliances – NBU 8.1.2 release introduces a master virtual appliance and virtual cloud catalyst appliance so you’re covered if you’re wanting a more software-defined deployment
• Containers are starting to get popular, flex appliance now offers backup infrastructure inside of a container
• Veritas can do a lot of the work for our customers so they can focus on what’s important

What about the process of upgrading?

• Offer 2 options for the upgrade of a client:
  • Templates are available for customers who want to use their own deployment tools
  • Automatic client updates (VX updates)
• 3 phase scheduled approach:
  • Pre-check: check common things as though it was being upgraded locally
  • Staging: pre-stage packages and send them to customers which cuts time
  • Schedule install: phased deployment to upgrade in batches
    
    

[FULL DEMO TOUR OF AUTOMATIC CLIENT UPDATE] Dave High, Lead Principle Technical Education Consultant

[Genericus]

With the advent of "Protection Plans" - what about SLP? 

How do you define multi-step backups?

[Genericus]

I see some nice stuff for tracking volume of data.

What about data throughput? 

I am all about MB/Sec of data writing to my storage, and then again to physical tape - please tell me you have improved the current OpsCenter standard of "we get yesterdays tape data at 01:00 each day"

[Genericus]

I am please to see the promise of the auto client upgrade - except i already have that on my unix environment running update_clients, nice that the windows guys can have that.

Nice to see the promise of features that are release independent.

Thanks for the XFS support for RHEL VM, been waiting for that.

Have to echo Marianne, was told XFS coming last year!, then spring, then end of July, then end of August, now September 17 - I have to download that and test, I will be getting access XFS for my production environment in November?

[SiobhanEllis]

Hi @Genericus

Could you be more specific about your issue and what you would like to see?

Thanks

[Michael_G_Ander]

Is there an on premises centralized reporting solution for us where cloud is a bad word ? Reading this as Smart Meter is a online/cloud solution.

[Genericus]

Throughput to tape, per hour for todays work would be a good start.

Today, I get all 0.

A dash board graphic that shows data backed up - or a heat map of throughput per hour to tape for today.

[jeffw4]

Can we utilize RBAC permissions and setup AD groups to have access to ONLY certain servers through the Web UI? Like if I want to allow the owners of the servers to do their own restores, but I only want them to be able to see their own servers.

[jeffw4]

Are there ever going to be any improvements made to OpsCenter or is it going to continue to just be left alone and fail to be of any real use?

[PetrHanz]

It is amazing that Veritas is developing new cloud technology support. But our customers are waiting for a functional RAC Oracle solution, for the ability to back up archive logs in PostgreSQL, the ability to backup throught multiple VLANs (no route VLAN) into one msdp pool, the ability to share msdp by multiple media servers, for Instant recovery and support GRT applications in Hyper-V,  XEN / KVM, Oracle VM,  for the ability backup VM in cloud -> replication to private Vmware cloud and restore this (conversion of restore between Amazon, Azzure and Vmware, Hyper-V).   

Petr

[jeffw4]

Looking for clarification on this feature...

• Provide download links to an end-users instead of Admins needing to download, granular restores, full restores, etc.

Does this mean that you can A) stand up a VM via Instant Access and then B) somewhere during that process you will get a link that you can then give to the application/server owner for them to copy what they need over to their server having the issue?

If so how is the cleanup of that Instant Access VM done and who initiates it?

[Marianne]

@JustineVelcich

Seems Veritas experts @Glen_Simon and @SiobhanEllis  were only online on 21 August to answer questions?

How does this help users who only watched the videos and asked questions a day or two later?

[jeffw4]

Seems pretty typical of Veritas these days...nobody watches these forums at all and no help for customers. Seems like Netbackup just isnt important to them anymore.