NetWorker 7.5.2 – What’s it got?

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:

1. Auto-addition of the update enabler. Starting with this version, if you go up to a version of NetWorker that requires an update enabler, NetWorker will create it automatically for you. You still have to get it authorised of course, but this saves smaller sites from the hassle of upgrading without checking for the enabler and then hitting problems.
2. Support for Windows 7 clients.
3. Support for Windows 2008 R2 as a client, storage node, and server. The company I work for, IDATA, got involved in the beta testing for this and were pleased with the results.
4. DFS-R Granular Recovery. A few months ago, I had an issue where a customer’s SYSTEM STATE: saveset was 18GB, due to DFS-R replication. The release notes indicate this shouldn’t be the case any more – this data should now be broken out of the SYSTEM STATE: saveset into regular file backup/recovery operations.
5. VCB support for ESX v4. I know I should mention this, but I remain overall unexcited about VCB because of the lack of granular Linux support. vSphere API backups, when they come, will grab far more of my attention, I hope.
6. Client parallelism on new clients is reduced from the previous (increase to) 12, back to the original 4. Client parallelism for the NetWorker server’s client instance on initial bootstrap/creation remains 12, and I’m fine with this. A reversion to client parallelism of 4 however will make performance tuning in new environments at least a little more sane.

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.