The Features
NetWorker 8.2 SP1 became available today, and as is becoming traditional for an SP1 release of NetWorker, the main focuses are on rolling up fixes from the cumulative releases – but that doesn’t mean it’s the only focus of the release. Included in the 8.2 SP1 release you’ll find several enhancements, and I’ve outlined them below.
New VBA Options
VBA was such a huge feature introduction that we’ll be seeing important additions slotted into it for the next several releases. For this service pack, a virtual machine that’s been cloned to a secondary site with its own vCenter and VBA appliance can be recovered on the secondary site to a different vCenter even if the primary site becomes unavailable, so long as it’s all within the same NetWorker datazone.
Additionally, VBA now supports dual-homing so that the backup appliance and proxies are provisioned onto a separate network space to the primary interface of the NetWorker server, neatly allowing you to split off traditional vs virtual machine backups.
If you’ve been using VBA with NetWorker, make sure when you upgrade to download the handy upgrade ISOs provided by EMC. These can be used to automatically boot your VBA appliance from and perform an in-place upgrade from whatever version you have been running.
NetApp Improvements
I admit I don’t use NetApp much, but support has been added for SnapVault and SnapMirror replication to remote NetApp devices. Check the release notes for more details on that one, since I’d likely do an awful job if I tried to summarise it.
Security Enhancements
NetWorker now supports https when communicating with a cloud server, which is definitely good for security. Further on the security front, you can now configure ssh port forwarding on your NMC client in order to run your NMC session over an ssh-encrypted link. In case you’re wondering, that’ll look like the following:
# ssh -L9000:localhost:9000 -L9001:localhost:9001 -L2638:localhost:2638 nmcServer -N
# javaws http://localhost:9000/gconsole.jnlp
That’ll be good not only for sites that are particularly paranoid about security (the NMC client/server communications process is already encrypted), but it’ll also be great for people working over VPNs. I tried this out today and it worked a treat. (At first I thought it was a little slow, then I realised my partner’s laptop was churning away at home with a CrashPlan backup flooding our link. A later test when the link was clear gave a much more favourable result.)
Logging
I’m a big fan of logging. I love logging, and I think you should keep your logs for as long as you keep your backups – so that if you have problems with any recovery you can go to the logs from the time and see whether there was an undetected issue with the backup. Logging gets a bit of a boost with NetWorker 8.2 SP1 via an option to redirect logs from cluster backups to more favourable locations than the default.
IPv6
Like it or loathe it (the formatting, not the idea, of course), IPv6 is continuing to gain traction. While many organisations will undoubtedly end up connecting to an IPv6 internet while maintaining an IPv4 intranet, added IPv6 support in NetWorker will always be beneficial: first to those organisations that go all-IPv6, and secondly to those that end up working with backups over an IPv6 internet.
In 8.2 SP1, NetWorker adds support for IPv6 NDMP backup and recovery operations, as well as Boost communication with Data Domain systems over IPv6.
Other Data Domain Enhancements
Support for DDBoost over Fibre Channel has been added to HPUX on IA-64, both for client direct and via storage nodes.
Renaming the NetWorker Server
The nsrclientfix utility can now be used to rename a NetWorker server. If you’ve not heard of nsrclientfix, don’t worry – it’s relatively new. I’m aiming to publish an article about it in the near future.
Should I upgrade?
As always, I’m not in a position to answer the question: should I upgrade? It’s going to entirely depend on what your organisation needs to do. That being said, I strongly encourage you to have a test/lab NetWorker environment where you can kick the tyres on the 8.2 SP1 release and make an informed decision as to when you jump up to this release.
For more information on NetWorker 8.2 SP1, including the binaries and all the documentation, make your way across to support.emc.com.