BESR 7.02

[snoopdog]

Just to give you a little history on my Backup Exec purchase first. I met a Symantec rep at a conference and he made me a lot of promises on what Backup Exec 7 would do for me. I was very impressed if it could do the things he suggested. For the initial purchase I ordered a license for two servers, the management software and 7 workstations.

It has been at least 4 months now and I have installed it at least 5 different times, different ways trying to get the bugs ironed out. All I can say is that this product never should had been released. My server is a new install of Windows 2003 server standard edition, the workstation I am typing on is a Windows XP Pro new install with only Visual Studio and Symantec Antivirus 10, nothing else. Every backup seems to fail on all the workstations at least several times a week. Last night before I left I connected two machines to the Server Management software, both patched to 7.02. This morning both workstations had Visual C++ errors and out of memory errors, the Backup Exec agent had failed and the computers were so slow from being out of Virtual Memory they both had to be shut down manually. Now these are robust machines, one with 2 gig and the other with 4 gig of ram. The file server is a very nice Dell Poweredge, also very new with a dual core Xeon and 4gb of ram. The backup drive is a 500gb connected directly to the server and everyone has full rights.

I am not an idiot and this software should just "work" out of the box. I have not fought this long to get something working since I started working with Linux, which requires just as much tinkering as this software. I could understand this amount of grief from Open Source software, but not something that cost me as much as it did. My question is why was this software released in it's present state and when is this 7.03 patch going to be ready ?

[RBall]

I've been evaluating the software and I must admit I've experienced much of the same grief you are describing. I've been holding off my final decision until 2 things hopefully happen...

1) Somebody tells me how I can evaluate the BESR Exchange Restore function. I was sent a nice retail pack with a SN that will not generate a key. Neither the partner nor Symantec have offered a working solution.

2) I can evaluate on the newest 7.03 version. What I'm looking at right now has been a series of quirks and bugs. I keep seeing errors that have no indication of the cause and no way to correct them. I realize I'm placing a lot of hope on 7.03 but at the moment that seems my only option.

Finding alternative software would be my other option.

Robert

[snoopdog]

I would like to add one thing to my previous statement. I also called Symantec in November about this problem and others. With Symantec Support we discussed Shadow Copy errors, VC++ errors (obviously BESR is written in VC++), out of memory errors, slow downs, AJAX errors, etc. The rep said for me to wait till December and the 7.02 patch will fix these errors. Well so far 7.02 has not been much help, since I wiped all of the machines I am still seeing the same errors. I would like to add though, I see all of these errors when using the Management Software to control the workstations. If I install the client local and do not manage them through the server then I have no problems at all with BESR, it works just fine.

The reason I went with BESR and not other products was the centralized management and the Bare Metal Recovery, which does not work as well as the Representative at the conference swore it would. In fact I had great communication with the guy up until purchase, now that I am having problems he will not return my emails.

[snoopdog]

Just letting know I called support one more time yesterday and they emailed me the link to download 7.03 server edition, and so far everything is working flawless. So far so good.

[RBall]

Could you forward the link to me or post it?

I've been unable to get liveupdate to recognize that an update is available except on the managment server. Even when I install LU on a server it reports that all the software is up to date.

Robert

[snoopdog]

Give me your email.

By the way, they said it was going to be 2 weeks before they put it on live update.

[RBall]

robert dot ball at bankersdashboard dot com

Interesting that LU finds it and upgrades the BESR on the management server. Using LU my BESR Version is 7.0.3.24709 but the LU on any of the other servers will not find an available update.

Thanks,

Robert

[snoopdog]

Check your mail

[RBall]

Thanks.

FYI

The upgrade patch 7.02 to 7.03 works without the need to reboot on 32bit systems. It will not function on 64bit servers, you will have to do the install from the 7.03 Prod installation files and reboot.

I found that closing the BESR Manager before going to the clients and applying the patch works best. Then after you patch the client, run BESR on the client server to get a current status and close the software. Now when you open the BESRM it will correctly see the new version.

I have not tried to upgrade my manager yet.

I have not tested the new BESR SRD 7.03 boot disk yet.

There does not appear to be an upgrade available for BESR Exchange Retrieve option (sad since mine does not work)

Robert

[snoopdog]

Guess what guys ?

7.03 is still garbage. Two fresh installs yesterday with 7.03, my Dell Optiplex 270 with 1gb ram was using 80% cpu utilization when I came in this morning. Guess what was using the CPU ? The Backup Exec service !! The thing is no backup was running.

My Dell Optiplex 620 with 2 gig of ram had a big fat Visual C++ error and the Backup Exec service was shutdown. I ive up and will wait on 8.0 and if it it still pure **bleep**e then I will find a linux based solution to backup my machines. Just letting you all know, these are the exact same errors I had with 7.01

[RBall]

I must concur... I'm not seeing an improvement or change in behavior. I'm not sure it's even worth the effort to upgrade.

Robert

[snoopdog]

It's almost as slow as the applet I am typing in right now on this forum.

[Andreas_Horlach]

I've got several Optiplex machines that are running fine with 7.03. When you say that you have 'fresh install' on these machines, does that mean you are using the Dell CD that came with the system?

[snoopdog]

Let me clarify some more. By fresh install on the GX280 was wiping, full patching Windows and Symantec 10, errors last night on the restore. I also installed it on a recently unboxed Optiplex 755 and the same thing. Now let me also clarify on my BESR 7.03 is the network agent install, not installed off the BESR CD. We use the managed version of BESR, that is what is not working. If we install BESR 7.03 straight from the cd all is OK and that work fairly well.

The problem is when you install BESR server edition and install the agents to your local machines and start nightly backups, the machines are hosed by the morning time and have to be rebooted. It just does not work !!

[Taco_Man]

And you are using 7.03 of everything now? (agent, console, manager)

[snoopdog]

Yes.

[Rich_L]

Please review private messages.

Thank you.

[DY]

If there was any solution in those PM's, it would have been nice to see the correspondance here.........

Anyway, I was wondering if the problem I'm experiencing is what you are describing here.  Purchased 7.0.2 a month ago, installed it on a central server and installed agents to ~15 servers running a mix of Server 2003 and Server 2000.

Two of the servers have experienced a problem, but that is all.  These servers fail the scheduled backup and sit running the System service pegged.  I tried running the backup manually and it completely crashed the server, requiring a hard reboot.

The other servers work great, I've even used the P2V on multiple of them.  This one problem is pretty critical though.  Any ideas?

[DStrauss]

Wait until you try and add more than 4GB of memory and find out everytime

you try to create an image you get the dreaded ED800012 error.

[TEKNOWLOGIX]

I've been using BESR since it was V2i Protector 2.0.  I've always liked the product...until BESR 7 came out, that is.  The scheduling is different.  I used to have my servers set to do hourly incrementals between 6AM and 6PM during weekdays, but there is no way to do that with 7.

After migrating all of my older Optiplex 170L machines to 7, I went to install a larger hard drive in one of them, and received an "EBAB00CC: blah blah blah...lack of memory" error upon attempting the restore.  Many of these machines are running XP Pro with 512MB of RAM which has been fine, up to version 6.5.  I thought perhaps the software was buggy, or that there was a problem with the images.  I pulled 1GB of RAM from another machine and put it in one of the 170L units and, low and behold, the restore is working.

The strange thing is the software didn't tell me on boot up that it requires 1GB of RAM and that the system only showed 512MB.  Whereas in the past if I tried to restore using 256MB of RAM it would tell me I needed at least 512MB.  I don't remember seeing any system requirements stating that 1GB of RAM is required to restore an image with BESR 7.

I'm less impressed with 7.  I'll keep hope out for 8.