{"id":5843,"date":"2016-03-30T06:39:25","date_gmt":"2016-03-29T20:39:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/?p=5843"},"modified":"2016-03-30T06:39:26","modified_gmt":"2016-03-29T20:39:26","slug":"networker-8-2-sp3","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/2016\/03\/30\/networker-8-2-sp3\/","title":{"rendered":"NetWorker 8.2 SP3"},"content":{"rendered":"

At the start of the week we saw\u00a0NetWorker 8.2 SP3 released. Now, you might think\u00a0given NetWorker\u00a09 is out there’s no new features in NetWorker 8.2 SP3, but you’d be wrong.<\/p>\n

NetWorker 9 is a jump \u2013 it’s a change of processes and it’s a new way of going about configuring your backups.\u00a0I’m seeing more\u00a0details every day of people having\u00a0great experiences with NetWorker 9, but backup is one of those areas where change can often come slowly, so\u00a08.2 still gets a lot of\u00a0attention. So if you’re\u00a0the sort of business that\u00a0needs\u00a0the features in NetWorker 9 you can dive in, but if you want to hang\u00a0back for a little while yet, 8.2 will have you covered for a while yet.<\/p>\n

\"nsrwatch<\/a>
The all new nsrwatch<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

OK, I admit I’m a bit of an nsrwatch<\/em> junkie. Unless\u00a0I\u00a0have<\/em> to setup a Windows\u00a0NetWorker server I’ll setup NetWorker on Linux every time. (But at heart I’m still a Unix\u00a0system\u00a0administrator. It was the Unix integration that drove me to Mac OS X, after all.)<\/p>\n

There’s a lot of good new features in NetWorker 8.2 SP3 but I have to admit given my CLI-junkie status, I just\u00a0love<\/em> the update to nsrwatch.<\/em> For me this handy little utility has saved me thousands or more times from having to launch a full GUI, and if you’ve ever seen how many windows I end up having active on my screens at the same time you’ll understand why that’s a good thing.<\/p>\n

The good old nsrwatch<\/em> utility now gives\u00a0you a lot more control over what you see on-screen. You can\u00a0resize panels or even turn them off\u00a0and<\/em> setup an environment variable to make that your default view. You can\u00a0switch between different views \u2013 e.g., all devices (seen above),\u00a0mounted devices and active devices:<\/p>\n

\"Mounted<\/a>
nsrwatch<\/em> showing mounted devices only<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\"nsrwatch<\/a>
nsrwatch<\/em> showing active devices<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

You also get control options directly embedded into nsrwatch<\/em> now:<\/p>\n

\"nsrwatch<\/a>
nsrwatch<\/em> with control options<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

All up, a great set of changes. I was lucky enough to try out some of the options while they were under development, so I’ve been looking forward to talking about it for some time now!<\/p>\n

That’s not the only features in NetWorker 8.2 SP3 though \u2013\u00a0but it did really appeal to my\u00a0I’ve-been-using-NetWorker-for-20-years<\/em> inner-geek \u2013 so it’s time to move on to the rest of the enhancements!<\/p>\n

Server Capability<\/h3>\n

There’s big changes under the hood in SP3 \u2013 the media catalogue has been migrated to SQLite to take advantage of the huge performance increases this gave in NetWorker 9 \u2013 and it’ll make the migration path to NetWorker 9\u00a0a little more streamlined as well. This may sound like a minor change, but the switch to SQLite is really\u00a0important; the old\u00a0format media database was great and stable, but it had limits on the amount of concurrent operations\u00a0you could do. SQLite is\u00a0great and stable\u00a0and<\/em> a lot more capable of supporting a number of concurrent operations.<\/p>\n

The server daemons have had some tweaks as well \u2013 a bunch of issues that could lead to a server hang situation have been quashed, and\u00a0the number of DNS reverse lookups performed has been pared down. The DNS caches used in a bunch of NetWorker daemons are now populated from\u00a0nsrd<\/em> to improve lookup performance as well. Also if you’ve got a\u00a0lot<\/em> of storage nodes in your environment, there are options to do a staggered start of the storage node manager daemons to improve startup performance.<\/p>\n

Data Domain<\/h3>\n

8.2 SP3\u00a0includes\u00a0support for DDOS 5.7 with an update\u00a0of Data Domain libraries to 3.1. This will align it to some new options coming out soon,\u00a0not to mention the Data Domain High Availability option introduced in the last month for the DD9500. (One of the other things it’ll align to I can blog about in a few days, hopefully.)<\/p>\n

There’s performance\u00a0enhancements for\u00a0Clone Controlled Replication (CCR) as well, allowing for\u00a0boosts (no pun intended) in the\u00a0performance of cloning operations between two\u00a0Data Domain systems under NetWorker control.<\/p>\n

SP3 also introduces support for\u00a0Distributed Segment Processing and all other Boost goodness into the Mac OS X client. That means if you’ve got\u00a0some Mac clients within your NetWorker environment they’ll now get all of the Boost advantages you see everywhere else.<\/p>\n

Updated Support<\/h3>\n

There’s a whole bunch of platforms\u00a0and options that have had support added in this release. Check out\u00a0the new VBA appliances if you’re backing\u00a0VMware, too \u2013 you’ll definitely want to\u00a0take advantage of\u00a0updates there. But it’s not just VMware backups. This version of NetWorker also adds support for:<\/p>\n