I thought I would take a brief break from my Tuning NetBackup series to write about a great Symantec website called VERITAS Operations Services (VOS). VOS is a great site that can be used to “dive deep” into your particular VERITAS software configurations. This is not your standard support site where you can get lost in the sea of menus and documentation for all of Symantec products. What makes VOS special is that you can utilize the site to get customized information on Installation, Upgrades, and perform Risk Assessments.

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 I’m sure all of you are aware of the challenges NetBackup engineers go thru when it comes to troubleshooting a slew of status codes that NetBackup has to offer when something doesn’t work right.  If you have ever navigated through the manuals DVD that comes with your NetBackup software pack, then you know that NetBackup is a big deal when it comes to troubleshooting a problem.  The troubleshooting guide alone has status codes from 1 to 914!!  Okay I know that it skips some numbers there in between but still that is large amount of codes to get familiarized on! So today I will to

NetBackup Tuning: Part 1 – Shared Memory

Here at the DLT Service Center we regularly get questions around NetBackup Performance Tuning.  So many, in fact, I am starting a “Tuning NetBackup” series, so many of you can tune your own environment.  Of course if you receive your support through the DLT Service Center, you can just give us a ring at 888.358.7658, and we’ll walk you through tuning procedures.

Heard about the new features in NetBackup 7?  If you subscribe to any Backup Technology thread, I am quite sure you have… Symantec’s marketing team has done a great job about getting the word out about the new features like VMware vStorage API functionality, OpsCenter, and Deduplication. In my previous blog I touched upon OpsCenter… but what is this whole de-duplication about?  Why do I care?  Simply put, I can de-duplicate everywhere in my NetBackup Environment.  Everywhere?  Yes, everywhere!

Please welcome NetBackup version 7 to the Symantec NetBackup family of products!  One of the feature enhancements in this version that I am really excited about is the VMware ESX backup utilizing the vStorage API.  Prior to NetBackup 7, it was required to setup and configure a VMware Consolidated Backup (VCB) proxy server to backup VMware guests with NetBackup.  This required you to potentially add additional hardware, an additional operating system license, and another device/layer to troubleshoot when things are

With the release of Netbackup 7.0 scheduled for the first quarter of 2010, I wanted to give you my take on the substantive features. There are three:

1. Expanded protection and recovery for virtualization NetBackup 7.0 is going to reduce the hardware requirements for VMware by eliminating the need for a Proxy Server for off-host backups.