My Initial report on v8

[RBall]

Since doing a full uninstall of 7.03 and installing BESR8 clean I have experienced:

Manager stalls, had to reinstall the manager on the agent to re-establish contact. Seems worse on Vista but has happened on Server 2003 as well.

Backups stall while in progress. I have one stalled now waiting and hoping maybe it will finish. It gets to the end of the file and sits, the progress bar is spotty, it will report 5%, 10%......45%......90% and stall. I've had it stall at 10% while the image grew to the full 39GB and never finish.  I also had the progress bar not start at all and a backup ran to completion.

Licensing is flakey. I installed the key using the manager but the agent did not recognize that it was licensed. I finally uninstalled and reinstalled BESR8 on that server because I refused to type the key in on the agent. On the second attempt it did register the key properly.

I also had a problem with "fix it" and assigning jobs to backups. I would click on fix it and it would want me to assign a job to the computer as if it was unassigned. When I tried to assign the job it would tell me it was already assigned. I had to use the Backup Now selection.

Backups are taking significantly longer than they did in v7.03.  The server that is stalling took 3 hours to reach the full image size on the backup destination, v7.03 was completing the backup in about 1.5 to 2 hours.

Overall... a flop.  Upgrading has not been worthwhile.  I've yet to test the Exchange Retrieve nor do I know if it will maintain the correct number of backup sets for my 64bit SQL servers. 

The interface is not different, I see no major improvements and I'm still loosing contact with the managers. In fact, things seem worse.

If you are running OK enough with 7.03 I'd tell you to stay there. If you are spending money to go from 7 to 8... IMHO you won't be happy.

/RB

[Natezilla]

RBall,

What type of media are you backing up to?  Do you have a dedicated backup server?  Where is your Manager loaded, on workstation or server?  Just wondering because I have not the bad expeirience.

My config=

BESRM is on 2003 R2 standalone physically (ISCSI) attached to 7.5TB of disk for backups only.  Then the backups are sent to a SCSI HP LTO4 library for tape archiving.

Just my physical machines are being backed up with BESR v8.  VMWare ESX machines are being backed up with vRanger Pro.

Granular restore option is on my 2K3 Exchange Server with Outlook 2K3. 

Full Backup time for a 200GB server is about 45mins.  Incrementals are 5-10mins. 

[RBall]

We have a dedicated W2003 SP2 running the BESR Manager with a 1TB RAID. All server are connected via a private GigE connection for "backdoor" traffic such as backups. With 7.03 I was seeing decent backup times but since we went to v8 on my non-critical servers (this is all the same hardware 7.03 was running on) I'm seeing much longer backup times on my system with the most data. It took more than 3 hours to backup 39GB which is up from 45 to 60 minutes. My other non-critical systems are not a good benchmark for this, they only have about 5GB of data on them. They seem to take a little longer, but it's hard to tell. I'll definately know when I bring the production servers in.

Are you verifying and indexing?

/RB

[Natezilla]

I am verifying but not indexing, I have not decided if I want to let my users have that function, Shadow Copy works very well for that.  I rarely ever have a request that goes beyond what shadow copy holds.  What has helped was creating a shared folder on the Backup Server, then pointing the destination for backups of each server to that share,  I used admin credentials for the shared folder.  In 7.01 I had a problem with the destination dissapeering or not communicating.  That was resolved with 7.02, but with a few non-communications still happening, v8 I have had no communication errors...yet.   I have the same problem with certains "windows of time" to get this stuff done, but so far so good.

[RBall]

Some progress of sorts... Turning indexing on or off has no effect on the trouble I was seeing.  I kept wondering what could be an issue and then remembered that I throttle to 50% of the gigE (500Mbps), I thought about how throttling works... I turned that off and BAM!  it worked.  Backed up 61GB native to a 39GB image in 20 minutes with indexing on. Never lost contact with the server, tried it 4 times, worked like a charm.  I verified I got my math correct, even tried throttling to 800Mbps, same problem.  Almost 4 hours to complete a backup, choppy progress bar and finally lost communication.

I guess I'll run unthrottled in v8.  My v7.03 installations were throttled so something must be up in v8 with it.

/RB

[David_F]

In version 8, there is a registry key change that may allow you to run in throttled mode, in 8.5 this key can also be added as well as with the following keys:

BESR 8.5 Backup Performance – http://support.veritas.com/docs/307579