Get off 7.2 and 7.3

 Backup theory, NetWorker, Support  3 Responses »
Jan 122010
 

On the NetWorker Mailing List, I still frequently see a lot of posts from people who are having various problems with their NetWorker 7.2.x servers.

It’s time to move away from 7.2. I know, it was the last version before nsrjobd; the move to nsrjobd in 7.3, then raw daemon logs in 7.4 can both be a bit shocking, but 7.2 is now critically old and critically out of support. Equally, there’s still a lot of people out there running 7.3 releases of NetWorker. That, too, exited support some time ago, and it’s time to move on from it too.

I’ll agree that within backup, there is a strong logic to the statement “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”, but, you have to weigh up that against the simple fact that 7.2.x releases in particular are very old, and 7.3.x releases are fairly aged as well.

Since I’ve been watching more and more of Top Gear, I’ll use a car analogy. Let’s say you’ve got a brand new, top of the line Ferrari. When it needs servicing, do you take it to the official Ferrari shop that provides a 100% warranty on all repairs and whose repairs keep the original vehicle warranty intact, or do you take it to Bill & Joes Motor Fixits ‘R’ Us, who not only might leave you with a car in a worse condition than when you drove it in, but who aren’t certified by Ferrari and thus lose you your new car warranty?

Continuing to backup your environment with a backup product which is long out of support is like outsourcing to Bill & Joes Motor Fixits ‘R’ Us IT Service.

I’ll be the first to admit that even on simple updates you can run into a few hassles. Particularly as you move up the NetWorker version chain you’ll find changes to authentication and name resolution requirements alone that may necessitate some additional work around the time of the update. If your clients are old you’ll also be needing to plan an update for them as soon as possible too, and in some cases, you may find yourself definitely having to update clients if there turns out to be some particularly odd issue.

But I’ll be honest: that little bit of up-front pain is much, much better than hitting a critical backup or recovery problem that can’t be solved without upgrading (or worse, can’t be solved due to incompatibilities between ancient NetWorker versions and modern operating system versions). Planning and implementing a controlled upgrade, even if it does end up having a few hassles, is infinitely better than doing an emergency upgrade without any planning to facilitate a recovery or a backup that has to be done.

 Posted by Preston de Guise at 05:06  Tagged with: , , ,

Long term NetWare recovery

 NetWorker  No Responses »
Dec 102009
 

Are you still backing up Novell NetWare hosts? If you are, I hope you’re actively considering what you’re going to do in relation to NetWare recoveries in March 2010, when NetWare support ceases from both Novell and EMC.

I still have a lot of customers backing up NetWare hosts, and I’m sure my customer set isn’t unique. While Novell still tries to convince customers to switch from traditional NetWare services to NetWare on OES/SLES, a lot of companies are continuing to use NetWare until “the last minute”.

The “last minute” is of course, March 2010, when standard support for NetWare finishes.

Originally, NetWare support in NetWorker was scheduled to finish in March 2009, but partners and customers managed to convince EMC to extend the support to March 2010, to match Symantec and co-terminate with Novell’s end of standard support for NetWare as well.

Now it’s time we start considering what happens when that support finishes. Namely:

  1. How will you recover long term NetWare backups?
  2. How will you still run NetWare systems?
  3. How will you manage NetWorker upgrades?

These are all fairly important questions. While we’re hopeful we might get some options for recovering NetWare backups on OES systems (i.e., pseudo cross-platform recoveries), there’s obviously no guarantees of that as yet.

So the question is – if you’re still using NetWare, how do you go about guaranteeing you can recover NetWare backups once NetWare has been phased out of existence?

The initial recommendation from Novell on this topic is: keep a NetWare box around.

I think this is a short-sighted recommendation on their part, and shows that they haven’t properly managed (internally) the transition from traditional NetWare to NetWare on OES/SLES. This is perhaps why there isn’t a 100% transition from one NetWare platform to the other. Being faced with unpalatable transition options, some Novell customers are instead considering alternate transitionary options.

Unfortunately, in the short term, I don’t see there being many options. I’m therefore inclined to recommend that:

  1. Companies backing up traditional NetWare who only need to continue to recover a very small number of backups consider performing an old-school migration – recover the data to a host, and backup on an operating system that will continue to enjoy OS vendor and EMC support moving forward.
  2. Companies backing up larger amounts of traditional NetWare should consider virtualising at least one, preferably a few more NetWare systems before end of support, and keeping good archival VM backups (to avoid having to do a reinstall), using those systems as recovery points for older NetWare data.

The longer-term concern is that the NetWare client in NetWorker has always been … interesting. Once NetWare support vanishes, the primary consideration for newer versions of NetWorker will be whether those newer versions actually support the old 7.2 NetWare client for recovery purposes.

With this in mind, it will become even more important to carefully review release notes and conduct test upgrades when new releases of NetWorker come out to confirm whether newer versions of the server software actually support communicating with the increasingly older NetWare client until such time as recovery from those NetWare backups is no longer required.

You may think this is a bit extreme, but bear in mind we don’t often see entire operating systems get phased out of existence, so it’s not a common problem. To be sure, individual iterations or releases may drop out of support (e.g., Solaris 6), but the entire operating system platform (e.g., Solaris, or even more generally, Unix) tends to stay in some level of support. In fact, the last time I think I recall an entire OS platform slipping out of NetWorker support was Banyan Vines, and the last client version released for that was 3 point something. (Data General Unix (DGUX) may have ceased being supported more recently, but overall the Unix platform has remained in support.)

If you’re still backing up NetWare servers and you’re not yet considering how you’re going to recover NetWare backups post March 2010, it’s time to give serious consideration to it.

 Posted by Preston de Guise at 04:37  Tagged with: , , , , , , , , , ,
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