Veritas (Symantec) Netbackup Client On OpenVMS

[VMS Support]

Does any one use Netbackup Client for OpenVMS ?
Could be a sea of silence on that question.

If you do what version do you run ?

We are currently upgrading to V5.0MP3 from V4.5MP4. This upgrade has been going on for a while and I would like to share some of the issues we have experienced and are still having.

God bless OpenVMS backup is what I say.

[John Lapchuk]

Would like to hear anything you have to say about it! Going to do the same here soon, and would like to know what problems you run into...

[Malcolm Wade]

We do; the financial services organisation I work has migrated to NetBackup across the board over the past 12 months, including lots of mission critical VMS. We run a shared VMS, Solaris, Windows, Linux environment with Solaris as the master and media servers. Tape libraries are MSL6060's connected via SAN and across sites so backups got 'offsite' as they are written. Catlog volume is presented to the master server from an EVA.

Minimal issues from a VMS perspective. Gigabit ethernet to the media servers for the big stuff; lots of Dev and QA systems running on 100Mb and even 10Mb links.

System pack restores can be annoying with the lack of a standalone backup type client but other than that; restores are easy and quick.

We are running V4.5MP7 with some VMS clients upgraded to V5.0MP2 (to resolve an 'though firewall' issue). We have yet to upgrade to V5.0MPx.

Overall, happy as ... and big savings from a consolidated approach to backup.

[Peter Quodling]

Not so much Netbackup, but I had a situation where we had a corporate mandate for Legato Networker. A plethora of "but it should work..." and the like.

I know a bunch of the Veritas people both local, and more importantly in the development labs - many are ex-DEC storage - they do know their stuff, but I agree, OpenVMS Backup works, why mess with it....


Q

[Malcolm Wade · Accepted solution]

Peter,

>I know a bunch of the Veritas people both
>local, and more importantly in the
>development labs - many are ex-DEC
>storage - they do know their stuff, but
>I agree, OpenVMS Backup works, why mess
>with it....

Much that it pains me to disagree about VMS Backup ... VMS Backup works very nicely in an OpenVMS only enviromment. Yes, using SLS I can sort of share a pool of drives for network based VMS only systems but I still can't multiplex streams of data on to a drive to get best drive performance. Can SLS and/or vanilla VMS Backup share a SAN based tape drive across non-clustered systems?

Unfortunately, in the multi-OS environment of todays businesses we need a solution that works across differing OS's with a common interface and format and I'm sorry; OpenVMS Backup doesn't fit into that category.

As you move towards into an enterprise backup solution sometimes there are tradoffs; in my case it was VMS Backup that got the boot in favour of NetBackup which performs admirably for standard system and application backups. I still use VMS Backup for systems management tasks; data moves, volume rebuild etc and wouldn't do it any other way.

Regards,
Malcolm

[VMS Support]

We run V4.5MP4. We did have various issues with early versions. However this version is more stable. You have to take care when doing restores and the use of *.*.* and *.*;* etc.

We started extensive testing on V5 about six months ago. I found some issues and they were fixed. We then tested against V5.0MP2 and found problems with restores of ODS5 files. Netbackup broke with file names like UPPER_lower_UPPER.DaT ...
Also found some other breaks.
MP3 fixed these issues.
I can provide details on problems and workabouts off line.

Been testing MP3.
Passed all tests.
Next step rollout to test and development.
Run on development servers (4 servers) for One month. All o.k.
Roll out to test cluster.
This is when I found the next problem.

1 GB file - When trying to secure data netbackup fell over with Exquota errors.
Same file on different disk secured fine.
??
Spoke to veritas and they said increase Bytlm on performing backup. This is the System account. Netbackup creates BPCD background process to perform backup.
Bytlm set to 64,000 on dev server that secures 3GB > files with no issues.
Set bytlm to 250,000 and rerun backup of failing file. Worked o.k.

While later fell over again on a different file.

On checking it appears that netbackup is not securing very fragmented files.
The file in question had 25,000+ extents and was only 130,000 blocks in size.

Sometimes you do have files like this.
File is always locked open ...grows and fragments. Very low I/O file ...
The point is that the file should still secure.

Secured file using OpenVMS backup (System account login) and worked ok.
Secured file using old version of Netbackup V4.5MP4 and secured o.k.

Call open with Veritas.

[Malcolm Wade]

> Secured file using OpenVMS backup (System > account login) and worked ok.
> Secured file using old version of
> Netbackup V4.5MP4 and secured o.k.

What do you mean by 'secured'. Are you taking about encryption here? Not an issue for me.

I have seen EXQUOTA errors on the very occasional restore, increasing BYTLM seems to fix those.

[VMS Support]

When I say secured ..I just mean backed up file ok using traditional OpenVMS backup.

I was given a new image by Veritas today.
Netbackup Client V5.0 MP4.

This however does not fix problem. Still get the Exquota error when trying to secure a very fragmented file.
You can fix the error by increasing Bytlm. But I have done this once ...64,000 to 250,000. Problem went away fro a while then came back. Increased from 250,000 to 500,000 and problem went away ...and then came back..It seems as files get more and more fragmented.
The old version backs the fragmented files up O.K. (V4.5MP4).
So what I need is the new version to handle badly fragmented file like the old version used to.
If I do increase bytlm to 500,000+ and run 20 backups in sequence (normal on some of our clusters)...then I will need to increase npagedyn by at least 20 * 500,000 bytes.

[Uwe Zessin]

As Malcom says...
the EXQUOTA is not really a Netbackup problem. It can happen with BACKUP, too. The problem is the mapping of all those little file extents which takes up resources.

[VMS Support]

Never seen it with OpenVMS backup in the last 23 years. Maybe I just never noticed it :-) ....
The funny thing is that the backup of the fragmented file works fine with the old version of Netbackup (V4.5MP4). And during the last two years of running under this version and previous versions we have never had any exquota errors. Upgrade to V5.0MP3 and I start getting the exquota errors popping up.

[Dirk Bogaerts]

better late than never...
have been using VERITAS NetBackup OpenVMS Client V5.0MP2 for some months now in test phase and even done the odd restore every now and again. Still need to do some more qualifying tests; among others on the soon to be introduced ODS5. Disks are kept in shape with DFU so didn't encounter yet the problems with heavily fragmented files.
And I still keep the good old VMS backup in place for the time being....

[VMS Support]

Dirk,
Take care with MP2 and ODS5 file names.
We tested with this and had problems restoring mixed case file name.
Veritas gave us MP3 as a fix to this.
This however had the exquota error when securing very gragmented files. They have put a fix for this into MP5 beta1. However this has a bug with IP ports. Will run up on a test sandpit box ..boot test ...but will not run up on a busy test server with several ip ports allocated. Other versions all work fine. So passed MP5 beta1 back to veritas to fix issue.
I have been told they have a limited engineering team that works on the OpenVMS client ( 1 engineer). However fixes are always very quick to come back, when we find an issue. So cant complain.

Check out the latest release notes for details of fixes in the various MPx releases.