need to sync Veritas catalog between production and DR Veritas domain

[FlyMountain]

We are planning to set up a Veritas Netbackup DR domain. Just wondering if we can AIR catalog backups to DR domain to sync all catalog images between two sites. When we ship the tapes to DR, we can kick off the restore jobs immeadiately without recovering catalog or importing tapes.

if not, is there any other way we can achieve this goal?

thanks advance !

[Genericus]

I have been asking for this for years. Setting up a DR environment I can AIR the catalog as is.

If you backup the catalog and AIR it to the DR at this time, it arrives as a catlog backup - which you must restore to use. So, no immediate use, unles you set it up to recover every day. ouch!

I had set up veritas volumes for my master and DR and used VVR ( veritas volume replicator ) to replicate my volumes - and this worked "mostly" - it was almost synchronous, but there were a few occaisons that some part of a backup got "lost" and I had to use a previous day backup to recover. So we no longer use it.

We are moving to replicated stored data for our production, tape restores are plan C or D...

[quebek]

Hi

Why not to AIR the backup images?? So back up to your production site to MSPD, then by leveraging SLP - repliacate to remote site (AIR) and once import will be done there you can recover this backup on the DR site?

Why to complicate simply things... maybe if you do not have a WAN link and MSDP (ie. NBU appliances 5240, 5330)...

[Marianne]

AIR can only be used with Dedupe storage.
Either MSDP or Supported 3rd-party OST Appliances.

The idea with AIR is to replicate the backups to remote/DR site. 
The backup image as well as the catalog portion gets replicated.
Once the image has successfully replicated, the catalog portion is imported into remote master's catalog. 
This means that the remote catalog is up to date and ready to restore.

About catalog replication when only tape is used - you can use any replication method that guarantees 'write order fidelity'.
As per the post by @Genericus, all catalog databases must be moved to a single volume.

The NetBackup in Highly Available Environments Administrator's Guide    contains a section called 
About non-clustered NetBackup master server with catalog replication

HTH

[Michael_G_Ander]

You might be able to AIR the catalog backup and just do a restore of the images part, if you for some reason can not just AIR of the backups them selves. 

But AIR of the backups them selves is clearly the best way to get DR of your backups

[Marianne]

IMHO, I cannot see how a catalog backup that is replicated via AIR can be used at the remote site .

AIR is replication between 2 independent master servers with different hostnames. 
Catalog backup can only be restored to master with same hostname.

Also bear in mind that AIR is not possible where there is only tape used for backups.
Maybe @FlyMountain can tell us if he has supported Dedupe storage at both sites?

[Michael_G_Ander]

Think I was unclear, did not mean the bprecover partial catalog restore.

But simply trying to restore the image files from the original master on the DR master through the normal restore GUI. 

But do not know if this cowboy trick still work, have not done it in quite a while. 

Nowadays you at least have to find a way to update the EMM with the tapes to be able to actually restore.

[FlyMountain]

thank you!

use third party to sync the file system is a good idea. the only drawback is we will sync everything such as all polies, clients and tape libraries which not exising on DR site, it may cause some other issues.

[FlyMountain]

We still use tapes as our majority backup media instead of using MSPD.