I have been working with clusters since the mid-90’s. Back then, for Oracle on Solaris, it was required to use Sun Cluster 2.0 for Oracle Parallel Server (OPS). I was not a fan of Sun Cluster 2.x, it had many issues, and I was hesitant when I was introduced to Symantec VCS. After working with VCS I started to see its simplicity and its benefits. I loved how easy it was to install, setup and manage. I became very familiar with it in a Sun Solaris environment.

If you want to use Storage Foundation 5.1 to manage dual path disk you may run into the following: if you install SF first and the disk groups appear fine. Then if you try to configure MSCS and it can’t see the disk. You may need to add the MSCS Option, so you can also add “VRTS STORAGE FOUNDATION OPTION MICROSOFT CLUSTER 5.1 WIN FOR OS TIER ENTERPRISE EDITION STE LIC” license key and it in should indicate that the MSCS option is available. However, when you go back to Add/Remove programs to select this option, it does not appear as a choice in the add/remove SF options. The Proper way to manage MSCS using SFW is VERITAS Storage Foundation for Windows (SFW) management data by creating disk groups from physical disk. These disk groups are further divided into volumes, which can be mounted from the cluster nodes.

Now that you've stood up your bright shiny new virtualization pod, all of your OS management issues are behind you, right? Not so fast. Virtualization does nothing for you in patch and configuration management, and can actually exacerbate the problem. Many workflows surrounding virtualization lean toward image based techniques, which can be more of a problem than traditional bare-metal techniques. Let’s look at the problems of image management and how you need a systems management solution in a virtual environment as much, if not more, than you do now.

Oracle Clusterware 10g will always handle node fencing (aka eviction) by rebooting one or more nodes. Oracle didn’t have its own cluster manager software for most platforms on 9i. So, if your customer was on a platform where Oracle didn’t have a cluster manager of its own (it only had a Linux and Windows), then building the RAC cluster would have required some 3rd party software. Some of the 3rd party cluster managers used different schemes to fence nodes from the cluster. Many of them used I/O fencing which is less disruptive in that it didn’t require a node reboot, but required more proprietary interfaces to be used to access and manage storage.

To put it simply, our goal as NetBackup administrators and engineers is to keep tapes spinning. What do I mean by that? Well, if your tapes are constantly spinning during your backup window, you will be taking full advantage of your underlying hardware and be backing up to tape as fast as possible. Sounds simple, right? Trust me, we all get the “Tim the Tool Man Taylor” fever, and want to purchase a beast of a backup device that will solve all of our backup problems. Of course, you must go through much red tape to purchase this “Tim the Tool Man Taylor” device, and more than likely it will be rejected because of “budget” or “It rained on Tuesday”. Whatever the reason for not purchasing, we still are left with backing up the same amount of data! What do we do? We make sure that we keep our tape drives we currently have spinning as much as possible. How do we do that? Well, let me introduce you to my friends Multiplexing and Multiple Data Streams (aka Multistreaming).

So you ask, “does it require a separate install procedure to enable deduplication with Symantec NBU7?” Uhh NO! With NBU 7, deduplication is built right in, there is nothing to install. If you want to turn on dedupe, all you to do is click a box in the GUI, and ensure that the media server is adequately configured for the additional dedupe workload.

So let’s say you are considering deduping via hardware, couldn’t you get more with Symantec NetBackup 7? Uhh Yeah!! NBU 7 has many advantages over standalone deduplication appliance.

Disable TCP Fusion Getting NetBackup status code 23’s?  How about status code’s 24, 25, or 53?  Maybe you just have the occasional status code 50’s?  Chances are you have TCP Fusion enabled. TCP Fusion has caused many issues with NetBackup as it performs flow control while utilizing blocking I/O sockets.  With that said, I recommend everyone disable TCP Fusion if they are using NetBackup. In order to disable TCP Fusion you can utilize one of two ways to do so. OPTION 1: NON- PERSISTENT

1. Make sure there are no backups or restores running

So we have identified and admitted to the problem. Now, let’s approach addressing it. One of the first tasks we need to do when taking on a “Cyber Hoarding” issue is to identify the extent of the problem.

Finally, a company has seen the light and offered an affordable, entry-level data deduplication offering that doesn’t have IT Managers counting pennies or Systems Administrators pulling their hair out!  Quantum is one of the storage industry leaders in data deduplication, having helped pioneer the technology in their disk based DXi offerings (see dedupe 101 video here).  Now they have presented a disk-based deduplication offering that focuses on the SMB a