After clearing with EMC (in this era of DMCA I like to get things cleared properly), I’m now hosting local copies of the EMC NetWorker documentation, for both the core software and modules.
If you visit the main nsrd.info site, you’ll find a new link for documentation. This currently covers all the database/application modules as well as documentation for NetWorker versions 7.4, 7.5 and 7.6. If you spot any broken links, please let me know!
As I mentioned in a post yesterday, NetWorker 7.5.2 (or NetWorker 7.5 SP2) has been released, and with it comes a bunch of feature enhancements as well as a slew of bug fixes.
One of the criticisms of EMC’s development process for NetWorker for a while was that a new service pack would come out with few, if any of the bug fixes added as hot-fixes and cumulative patch clusters for the previous service pack. This is something that EMC have clearly been improving on, because reading through the release notes with the almost 150 bug fixes cited, I see many “familiar” issues that were addressed in various cumulative patch clusters for 7.5.1. On this alone, I’ll give 7.5.2 high praise.
I’ll be running up 7.5.2 in my lab today and looking at a few test cases, etc., but so far of the improvements that have been made in this new service pack, I’m pretty stoked about the following:
Overall I have high hopes for 7.5 SP2. If you’re currently needing to backup Windows 2008 R2 or Windows 7 hosts, this is probably going to be a no-brainer: you’ll likely want to upgrade at least those clients to it straight away.
Before I recommend 7.5.2 more generally of course, I want to run it through its paces. I will reiterate though – even on first glance, it seems very promising. As is always the case, you should make sure that you read the release notes before you contemplate upgrading – and have a clear downgrade path if you need to. This means that if you’ve been supplied with any hot fixes, or cumulative patch clusters, you need to make sure you still have these available as you’re planning the upgrade.
Typical that it happens on a day when I’m travelling, but NetWorker 7.5 SP2 (aka NetWorker 7.5.2) has been released today.
There’s a bunch of updates and bug fixes in this release – I actually have really high hopes for it based on discussions I’ve had with various folks at EMC. I’m about to start an hour long train trip where I’ll be reading the release notes – if you have PowerLink you can access them from here.
I’ll aim to have a summary posting of new features and bug fixes in the next 24 hours. In the interim, let me just say that I’m over the moon to see that one of the first new features is a reversion to default client parallelism of 4 rather than the previous change to 12. This is very good to see changed. (Oh, not to mention support for Windows 2008 R2.)
[Edit, 2010-02-25]
An overview of new features, etc., can be found here.
Recently we’re seeing a lot of people upgrading to Windows 2008 SP2, without first checking to see that release notes and compatibility guides state that NetWorker doesn’t yet support this release.
I fully agree that this represents monumental slowness on the part of EMC … there’s absolutely no excuse – none whatsoever – for them not to be on the relevant developer programmes and partner programmes for all the supported operating systems so they get access to the new releases before they come out and then make sure there’s either hot-fixes or cumulative updates available to support new operating systems.
They don’t have to be on the same day, but it’s foolish short-sightedness at best that they don’t support a new OS release within say, 2 weeks of it hitting the general public, given that partner and developer programmes will give access to it for months in advance of that point.
Now, back to my original point – if you’re planning on rolling out a new service pack to an operating system, please take a few minutes to read the release notes or software compatibility guides – or ask your support team to fill you in, and if it’s not supported, roll out to a test client first so you can confirm the impact to your backup environment.
It takes two to tango – EMC needs to improve their response to new operating systems and new major updates to operating systems, but it’s equally important for people to remember to check these things before they upgrade, not after they get the first backup (or worse! recovery) error.
(Do I do these checks all the time? No – only in lab environments. It’s my job to identify bugs and issues before my customers find them as much as possible.)
To me the most valuable documents produced by EMC in relation to NetWorker or the modules are the Release Notes. These accompany any cited version update and typically contain at least the following chunks of information:
This information is gold. To anyone thinking of updating either a NetWorker server or a NetWorker module who isn’t planning on thoroughly reading the release notes first I say this: are you nuts?
I’m the first to admit that I don’t re-read the administration guides every time they are updated. There’s just too much content in them. Instead, I rely on the release notes to tell me what has been added, and if any of that is relevant to my needs, I go searching through the administration guides for said information. In fact, I consider the release notes important enough that they’re the only NetWorker documentation I ever print. Why do I print them? Because it means I can take them away from the computer and go sit down and read them carefully – very carefully.
The release notes don’t always contain all information about an update. They also may not fully elucidate on particular problems that have been fixed*.
To me the most important aspect to the release notes – the bit I check first, is the “Known problems and limitations”. Why? This is the bit that gives you the warnings of “things that don’t work”, or “things that you may have to pay more attention to than you would otherwise think to”. I.e., what is known to not work. One would ignore these in particular at ones own peril.
So, next time you’re thinking of updating any part of your NetWorker environment, please, make sure you download and read the release notes.
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* I can attest to this when I review release notes and see LGTscABCDEF numbers that have been created in response to bug filings I’ve made … a 2-3 line entry can’t convey all the details of sometimes complex, sometimes esoteric escalations.
