The classic NetWorker install will see:
- A bunch of clients
- Optional storage nodes and/or dedicated storage nodes
- The NetWorker server
- The NetWorker Management Console server running on the NetWorker server
Architecturally, there’s no reason why you have to have the NetWorker Management Console server running on the backup server itself. Both logically and architecturally, there are good reasons why you would choose to keep these separate. Let’s start by using a diagram to show how the alternate architecture looks:
So, what are the advantages of this sort of layout? There’s three distinct advantages:
- Feature access – in my experience the vast majority of backup administrators are conservative in their approach to the technology in use. This means that there’s a slow-ramping process for adoption of new backup server software. While some users will hop on the bandwagon straight away, others will wait for a while. The momentum eventually builds up, but it takes a while to get there. In the meantime though, we periodically encounter situations where the features in the latest version of NMC are highly desirable. For instance, the unified monitoring provided in the version of NMC that comes with NetWorker 7.6 should appeal to just about every NetWorker administrator out there. If the NMC server and the NetWorker server are one and the same machine, it makes rolling out a new version of NMC while keeping the old version of NetWorker practically impossible. On the other hand, if the NMC server and the NetWorker server aren’t the same machine, it’s trivial to upgrade a single client to the latest version of NetWorker and NMC.
- Performance – in small environments, the footprint of the NMC server creates negligible additional load on the backup server. As the number of clients and simultaneously active savesets ramps up though, the load of the NMC server – particularly with multiple accessing consoles – the impact of running the NetWorker Management Console server on the backup server can be observed. By keeping these hosts separate, the problem does not happen.
- Protection – the NMC server has become considerably more stable over its lifetime, but like all software, there are no guarantees that it is crash proof. If the NMC server isn’t running on the same host as the backup server, then it gives you the advantage of being able to reboot the NMC server should there be an issue with monitoring, without impacting the actual backup server itself. In actual fact, keeping systems separate that don’t need to be together gives you better options for fault handling, upgrades and scheduled maintenance.
Assuming you want to run the NMC server as a separate host to the NetWorker server, it’s really quite easy:
- Using either nsradmin or the existing NMC install on the backup server, modify NetWorker’s Administrator user group to include administrators from the NMC server.
- Install the NMC server and NetWorker client software on the intended host. (If on Unix, I always recommend also installing the NetWorker man pages. You never know when you’ll need them.) Be sure to allow NetWorker to setup the NMC backup instance if you want your database backed up and aren’t sure how to configure this manually.
- Shutdown NMC on your backup server and configure it to not automatically start up. If necessary you can start it later to retrieve historical reports – otherwise you can leave it there installed, but not running, to avoid confusion.
Another good reason not to run NMC on your Networker server….
NMC doesn’t support running anything else on port 80. If you want to run the fabulously useful open source networker reporting tool (available here http://users.skynet.be/networker_reporter/ ) you will need to run NMC on an alternate host.
Cheers.
Hi Nancy,
What platforms are you experiencing that on? I’ve not observed this myself, and have had several hosts and systems setup in the past (and recently) where the NMC server was running on a server that was already running other web services. The NMC server typically runs on port 9000, not port 80.
Cheers,
Preston.
Hi Preston.
EMC/Networker support wouldn’t help us troubleshoot issues on NMC with other services running on port 80. We are running Networker server on Solaris 10 – looking to migrate to linux sometime. We moved NMC to an alternate server so we could continue to run the reporting utilitiy to an alternate host, this fixed the phantom problem we were having with NMC.
NM
I have been told by EMC Support that, especially if your Networker server is running on a cluster, then it is always best not to run it on any of the cluster nodes, this was following issues where the cluster would time out and fail over. When we moved the NMC server to a different node, the failover issue went away.
Also, for reference, I have also seen problems running NMC on any cluster where you have another product active, for instance Alphastore. A quick fix for this was to run NMC on the ‘idle’ cluster node, always ensuring that if the main cluster application failed over, NMC was also failed over to make sure it was always on the ‘idle’ node.
Hi Preston.
I’m planning on divorcing the NMC from our NetWorker 7.5.3.1. and use the NMC that ships with 7.6.1 that should be out in a few weeks (I’ve been told september 1st).
Do you know if there are any issues using a version of NMC that introduces features that are not in the NetWorker server version it’s managing? E.g. NMC in 7.6.1 has scheduled cloning GUI. I wonder if that would work if the 7.6.1 NMC is controlling 7.5.3.1 NetWorker.
Johannes
Hi Johannes,
Sorry for not responding sooner…
There shouldn’t be any issues with that configuration; NMC is aware of the options available in each version and should simply just not present those options to the lower version of NetWorker.
Cheers,
Preston.
Hi Preston.
Can you be running NMC on both the NetWorker server and the intended NMC server at the same time? This is obviously not something that should be practiced, but it might be feasible to keep the NMC running on the NetWorker server while validating the install on the intended NMC server.
If the NetWorker server is running 64bit NetWorker on a 64bit OS, can the NMC be running on 32bit x86 system?
Best regards,
Joe
Hi Johannes,
No issue with running multiple NMC servers pointing at the one backup server; while this may potentially have a performance impact on the backup server, so long as the server is appropriately designed in accordance to the backup workload, it’s manageable.
I’ve got a few customer sites where they run at least 2 NMC consoles at all times; that way if there’s any issue with NMC they’ve got a backup console that they can connect into.
There’s no issue with 64 vs 32-bit for the console vs server (or vice versa); they’re wholly independent of one another in that respect.
Cheers,
Preston.