Using NetBackup with Oracle ZDLRA: A Collaborative Approach to Oracle Protection
I recently had a customer ask about NetBackup versus Oracle ZDLRA—a comparison I typically avoid framing as a competition. The reality is, NetBackup and ZDLRA can serve complementary roles, and leveraging both can deliver strong Oracle data protection while supporting broader organizational requirements. NetBackup provides robust, enterprise-grade Oracle coverage. It’s designed to meet the protection needs of most customers while supporting a secure, scalable 3-2-1 data protection strategy. Meanwhile, Oracle ZDLRA offers specialized functionality for Oracle database recovery that can integrate well into this strategy—though many customers aren't aware of how effectively the two can work together. If your organization has invested in ZDLRA—a purpose-built solution for Oracle backups, albeit with limited visibility outside of the DBA team—you don’t need to treat it as a standalone silo. NetBackup can be integrated to reduce overall deployment cost, improve operational visibility, and enhance long-term retention and disaster recovery capabilities across the enterprise. Optimizing ZDLRA with NetBackup Instead of sizing ZDLRA to retain months or years of data—or replicating it across sites to meet compliance and DR requirements—you can configure ZDLRA for short-term retention (e.g., a few weeks). From there, NetBackup can take over for long-term storage, ensuring cost-efficiency and compliance with data protection policies. By installing the NetBackup client directly on ZDLRA nodes, NetBackup can orchestrate backups from ZDLRA to its own storage tiers, enabling deduplicated, efficient data movement and long-term retention. This hybrid approach is generally more cost-effective and operationally sustainable than over-sizing ZDLRA. Integration Steps: NetBackup + ZDLRA To integrate NetBackup with ZDLRA for seamless Oracle protection: Install the NetBackup client on the ZDLRA nodes. Allow NetBackup to auto-discover the Oracle RAC databases hosted on the ZDLRA nodes. Configure credentials for the discovered RAC databases in NetBackup. Create an Oracle policy in NetBackup using the “Clients for use with scripts” option. Update the existing backup scripts on ZDLRA to include the necessary NetBackup configuration for those databases. Once configured, NetBackup will treat those Oracle databases like any other client—protecting them with centralized policy management, broad visibility, and efficient long-term retention. More importantly, this setup ensures stakeholders across IT, compliance, and business continuity can access recovery insights—not just DBAs. It’s Not Either/Or—It’s Better Together There’s no need to choose between NetBackup and ZDLRA. When used together, they deliver a comprehensive, scalable Oracle protection strategy that balances performance, cost, and visibility. Organizations gain the flexibility to align with both DBA-centric recovery workflows and broader enterprise data protection policies.Protecting Oracle Databases with HCC Using Veritas NetBackup
As organizations continue to adopt Oracle Hybrid Columnar Compression (HCC) to achieve substantial data reduction and performance optimization for data warehousing workloads, it becomes increasingly critical to ensure robust protection strategies for these databases. Veritas NetBackup delivers comprehensive support for Oracle databases leveraging HCC, seamlessly integrating with Oracle Recovery Manager (RMAN) to enable high-performance, policy-driven backups that maintain data integrity across both HCC-enabled and non-HCC storage environments. NetBackup leverages RMAN’s block-level capabilities to perform efficient full and incremental backups of Oracle databases, including those utilizing HCC on Oracle-engineered systems like Exadata and ZFS Storage Appliances. Through tight RMAN integration, NetBackup preserves the compression format during backup, minimizing storage consumption and backup windows while supporting deduplication for further optimization. This allows database administrators to maintain their HCC benefits even in backup and recovery workflows, while centralizing control and reporting through NetBackup’s interface. In recovery scenarios, NetBackup supports full flexibility whether restoring to an HCC-capable system or to a non-HCC environment. When recovering to an HCC-compatible platform, the compressed data remains usable in its native format, preserving both performance and storage efficiency. If recovery is directed to a non-HCC destination—such as traditional file systems or third-party storage—the restore process completes successfully, but the data must be uncompressed before it can be accessed. Full guidance on these options is available in Oracle’s official documentation on restoring HCC tables. NetBackup ensures that backup and recovery operations remain consistent and reliable across both HCC and non-HCC environments.
Oracle Backup - Database must not contain any data files that are in backup mode.
Dear online team, Since upgrading from NetBackup 9.1 to NetBackup 10.4 we I have errors with Oracle backups if two jobs are run simultaneously. Let's say large database that needs 10 hours for the FULL backup to complete. During the time this backup is running, another Archive Log backup starts. (we have archive log backups running every half hour) This Archive Log backup fails with following error that was not the case previously: (5457) Database must not contain any data files that are in backup mode. This was not the case before and you could run as many jobs as you want at the same time.. This only happens to container databases that has pluggable databases inside the container. CDBs Has anyone experienced anything similar? Any help would be really appreciated. I even updated to NetBackup 10.5 but issue still remains..
"Rman Backup Error du to "ORA-12269: client uses weak encryption/crypto-checksumming version
When Taking backup for Oracle data base I keep getting the below error: RMAN-00571: ====================================================== RMAN-00569: ============ ERROR MASSAGE STACK FOLLOWS ============= RMAN-00571: ====================================================== RMAN - 12001: Could not open channel ch02 RMAN-10008: Could not create channel context RMAN: unable to connect to target database ORA-12269: client uses weak encryption/crypto-checksumming version
Protecting Oracle Standard Edition High Availability (SEHA) with BackupExec v22
Dear all, We have a prospective customer using Oracle Standard Edition High Availability (SEHA) over Oracle Linux 8.6. After checking the Backup Exec v22 SCL file I don't see anything about the support for Oracle SEHA databases, is it supported? Being an Active/Passive cluster option for Oracle Standard, do we support the failover between nodes using our BE Agent for App and Databases from the active node to keep the backup service ready from the node alive? Best regards, Jose.NetBackup Enhancements for Oracle VLDBs (Very Large Databases)
In this day and age, data tends to only increase in size. For our customers with ever-growing Oracle databases (DB), timely backups and restores are a challenge. We have many existing features within NetBackup to protect Oracle, and now we have added a solution for Oracle Very Large DBs (VLDB). Figure 1. Oracle policy option to select multiple MSDP storage units The designation of “Very Large” is arbitrary, but a widely accepted definition is a database that is too large for the data protection to succeed in the desired time window. Oracle DB protection struggles are focused on completing backups faster, but the ability to restore within the expected time frame is often ignored, resulting in missed Restore Time Objectives (RTOs). This new Oracle policy option allows segmenting the Oracle backup across multiple NetBackup MSDPs (Media Server Deduplication Pools) storage units with the ability to choose which storage units are used (see Figure 1). For a single stream, this results in a backup image that is in the catalog as a single image, with the image’s fragments tracked in the catalog on each storage unit selected. A single backupid makes tracking and reporting streamlined. You can also increase the number of parallel streams. Allowing simultaneous writes to multiple disk pools increases the efficiency of the streaming backup. The number of storage units to use for the best results will vary from one database to the next. Further, take advantage of multiple parallel streams to further tune your Oracle backup. Storage units are linked to disk pools, and the most effective use of this option will leverage multiple storage units that are linked to multiple unique disk pools hosted on different media servers. This solution also works with where the nodes of a single Flex Scale are managed independently and only one storage unit is presented to NetBackup. There will be affinity for the database backup to write the same file, or piece, of the database backup to the same MSDP storage unit, so do not change this configuration often. Some of the considerations will be: Number of nodes in a RAC (Real Application Cluster), Number of instances, Number of parallel streams As more parallel streams and storage units are configured for the policy, the gain in performance is geometric improvements in the backup times. This must be aligned to your backup and restore goals and your existing infrastructure to avoid creating bottlenecks in the performance. To meet the desired goals, there may be a need to add more MSDP pools rather than having a few large pools each with a single node. Additionally, consider more load balancing media servers to also share data movement responsibilities. This solution can also use Storage Lifecycle Policies (SLPs) as multiple storage targets, enabling you to maintain your current business continuity and DR (Disaster Recovery) plans for your Oracle data. When selecting multiple storage units, you would select a different SLP (Service Lifecycle Policy) for each destination. If the desired SLP is not shown, confirm that it is using supported MSDP storage units. It is key that the SLPs for this use-case all be designed and configured with the same goals, including retention levels, and different source and target storage units. For example, if splitting the Oracle backup across 2 SLPs, each SLP would use a different backup storage unit, and a different secondary operation storage unit. In the case of replications (AIR (Auto Image Replication)), the replication relationship between the on-prem MSDP and the target MSDP each needs to be under the same target primary server (see Figure 2). It is possible to replicate many-to-one, but this would remove the benefit of segmenting the image across multiple disk pools. If the replication targets of only a portion of the database went to a different NB domain or were not retained for the same period, the image would not be complete and a restore would not be possible. Figure 2. SLP configuration requirement for multiple MSDP storage units with replication When the need for a restore arises, NetBackup takes advantage of multiple sources to read and stream back to the destination, with each disk pool reading a piece of the database image simultaneously. This results in a faster restore time for a large amount of data. The Disk Pool’s Maximum I/O streams setting will need to be adjusted according to the peak performance of the disks and the potential number of restore and backup streams. This setting can be changed dynamically, without a restart of services, to meet changing needs. Consider, also, the impact of load balancing media servers in such a configuration. If all media servers have credentials to all storage servers, they can potentially perform the requested read action during a replication or restore operation. In circumstances where some media servers are already busy doing other jobs, such as backups, NetBackup will choose the next-least-busy media server to perform the requested action. For most situations, it will be best to configure only the media servers needed for these repetitive actions to have access to the disk pools in-use. Plan disk pool deployment to maximize the throughput from the Oracle clients to multiple media servers and their NetBackup deduplication volumes. Take advantage of this new parallelism to improve throughput performance for both your backup and recovery operations for your Very Large Oracle databases to meet your strict RTOs.
