Netbackup for IA64 / OpenVMS 8.3

[MJVPW]

Hi, I was wondering if anyone out there had any experience of this product on this configuration and what the pain factors are/were?

[Malcolm Wade]

Been using it on VAX, AlphaServer and (as it became available) IA64 OpenVMS systems for 5+ years now.

Config of the VMS client is easy; two directory structures, one TCP service. Nothing more to it. Updating requires simple placement of 3 .exe's in NBU$DIR.

Of course, you need NetBackup Master and Media servers to support it; we use dedicated Gigabit links to ensure good data rates.

Main thing is to read the manual about performance; make sure your account quotas are as they say (like any backup product).

All very straight forward.

[MJVPW]

Malcolm,

That sounds promising. We are looking at it in order to standardise with our distributed areas. Netbackup is in use enterprise wide, so we needn't worry about the rest of the infrastructure being there, just the client aspects for VMS. Do you happen to know how licensing works for VMS?

[Peter Zeiszler]

We have it in our environment as well. The only difficulty we have is doing a restore to an alternate directory we have to do from the client.

We have it running on multiple netbackup client versions. OS is alpha and itanium, 7.3-2 to 8.3-1h1.

[Cass Witkowski]

Peter,

How do you restore the system disk on your Itanium running OpenVMS with netbackup?

[John Gillings]

Cass,

I'd be surprised, no make that astonished!, if a generic backup solution like Netbackup were capable of a "hands free" save and restore of a VMS system disk.

I'd expect a backup strategy of having an image backup of your system disk dating from the last installation, upgrade or patch, and a daily backup of volatile files. My preference is to capture a hot copy of open files with CONVERT/SHARE daily, and backup the copies. Restore is then an image restore of the static backup, then restore the volatile files.

Of course, if you've migrated all the volatile files off the system disk, then you have a relatively static disk to start with.

Having said that, I don't have any experience with Netbackup, so I could be completely wrong! Maybe Malcolm can explain his restore policy?

[Cass Witkowski]

I've been very curious about how one restores an OpenVMS system if the system disk takes a powder when using a product like netbackup. I haven't found a good solution but there are smarter people than me out there who may have.

[Andy Bustamante]

Cass & John,

I tested and accepted using Netbackup several years ago.

To restore using Netbackup you need to bring up at least one system. This can be from tape or a fresh install. In theory, you can can restore a current system disk once you have a first pass restore disk and use the writeboot utility to make it bootable. This process is documented in the Netbackup user guides.

However, when I used this, I scheduled regular system disk backups and planned to restore the operating system from tape. Individual files can be pulled from Netbackup if required and dropped into place.

Andy Bustamante

[Cass Witkowski]

Bring up one system from tape or fresh install...

Netbackup means I may not have a tape device on my system. Doing a fresh install means I need to have a DVD in the system with a install kit of OPenVMS which I would have to install from scratch, then I would have to install netbackup software and then configure the network IP addresses etc. All this just to recover my system disk. Even more fun if done remotely

[Malcolm Wade]

From a licensing perspective there's nothing on the VMS side of thing. It's just another NetBackup client (for which you need standard client license on the Master server which these days are known as XPLAT (Cross Platform)). Not sure how you obtain the GA s/w release; it got one many years ago and have been just applying the new (3) platform specific images as they come out.

As for System Disks; I have on a number of occasions had to restore them from full and cumulative/differential backups with no issues. Yes, you have to writeboot after the restore. I restore via another server; then pull the disk and move as I need.

It would be nice if there was a simple way to generate a VMS CD w/ IP on it that I could then put NetBackup on as well to boot from; thus making the restore even easier but the above way works for me so I'm not overly concerned.

[Peter Zeiszler]

Sorry Cass - wasn't up on reading forums.
That is exactly our "plan" if we lose a system disk. Create a new system install, install IP stack, Install netbackup, get it to recover. All of our netbackup tapes and netbackup servers are remote - usually same site - but not always.

That option also is why I always try to have a shadow copy of the disk so that if one disk dies I have a chance to get it replaced before the other one dies.

On systems that I don't have shadow license I actually create a backup image to a local disk as an emergency recovery.