BESR unreliable for 1 server out of 4, v6.5 seems less stable than 6.0.3

[Systems_Admin]

We installed 6 about a year ago on three servers. One server (W2K AD+File services) has always had issues with LSR. The console would hang, the imaging would cause clients that connect to the remote server to have performance complaints. We went to 6.0.2 and 6.0.3. .3 seemed to be the best/most reliable. Then we decided to try 6.5, and the sh*t hit the fan. Worst of all. The server will show strange behavior if the BESR server is reboot (windows patches and the like) The console screen will be completely white and I will need to modify the preferences.xml file to get back in again. Agent communication is lost. I can't use the product until the remote server is rebooted, hardly ideal. Another server, quite new, is now losing communication to the BESR console/delayed write failed error messages.

Any ideas? It seems like this product really tanks on some types of hardware. But the server it's loaded on is years proven, multiprocessor, low memory use, and a workhorse... it should work great...

We just loaded BESR on a 4th server, very very powerful, SQL 2005, 4 gigs ram, and in our testing BESR interfered with SQL to the point of crashing it. We *had* to take BESR off the vendor wouldn't certify the server for use.

I really like the idea of this product, but it's not working for some reason...

Message was edited by:
Systems Admin

[Systems_Admin6]

And another 'ignored' post?

Maybe I'm wrong, but is there any kind of direct tech support available for this product?

I've been seeing similar issues with a new server I just received. Testing through it now...

[Systems_Admin]

Hey we have almost the same handle.

We were able to work around this problem from stopping vprotray from running at startup, and on the one unstable server excluding the data partition (d:) This is hardly an ideal solution.

We called symanitas and they recommended we uninstall, wipe dirs, then reinstall, which would require at least 2 reboots of a server that has already seen far too many reboots due to this product.

We just won't renew maintenance. We're also dumping Backup Exec, tired of the exhorbitant maintenance fees on that as well.

[Systems_Admin6]

Heh. I noticed... :)

That's the second reference to Symantec AntiVirus that I've seen in relation to these issues, and it would be ironic if their AV product caused their Backup product to fail. I've got the luxury of having a small user base, so I have more flexibility for reboots, etc. I'll try to wipe the dirs and see if it fixed my problem on the reinstall.

I'm not paying maintenance on this product (we do on the AV), but I would hesitate dropping them entirely. Although I would feel more comfortable if a Symantec support rep would comment on threads like this (ARE YOU LISTENING, SYMANTEC?) to let us know we're not forgotten. I've seen LSR work well (on a system with AV), and the sparsity of people in this forum tells me it works for most people.

I used to do tech support for Pinnacle Video Editing, and I'd say about 70% of the user base had it work fine, 10-15% never reported any problems, but the remaining 15-20%? They had problems that just shouldn't have ever happened, and had no (or a very hard) explanation. I've seen 6 identical PCs built at the same time. Norton AV failed on 2, and McAfee failed on the other 4. You probably have something common to your systems that BESR just doesn't like at all...

[Andre_Bourque]

.Message was edited by:
Andre Bourque

[Systems_Admin6]

Well, that was helpful, Andre. :)

I ended up totally uninstalling Symantec AV, and BESR's behaviour improved somewhat. No more 'hard' crashes, but it would still reboot the system. Sometimes it would fail on image creation, and sometimes a file copy from my IDE internal backup HD to an external USB drive would fail. I'd also get numerous system failures on restart with DEP errors.

I was starting to think it was a USB driver thing, or a hardware flaw (like memory, CPU or my SCSI card)... But I just downloaded Acronis, and it seems to work fine. Even when I dared use it to backup direct from my RAID array.

[techno_nerd]

Hello,

When I had these issues, with both SAV and BESR, I had to make sure that I uninstalled both completely, installed the BESR first, and then the SAV. This seemed to help alot and make things run better.

Technonerd