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The backups work wonderfully, and the restore of a plain backup works as well.

What I’m having trouble with is something that’s so simple in Oracle and DB2 that it’s stumping me that I can’t find any documentation on it for SQL.

In any real RDBMS, you would restore the datafiles to disk and mount the database in a recovery mode, and then roll whatever transaction logs you want to into the database.  I’ve even seen it done with Oracle and DB2 where specific transactions can be edited out of the transaction log, IE to remove a transaction that corrupted a database while preserving subsequent writes.

But in SQL if you’re restoring a database you have to use the stupid GUI.

I’ll keep plugging away, but if anyone has any ideas I’d be greatful.  (Not being a Microsoft guy, I don’t have anything like this in my little bag-of-tricks.)

 Jesse

 

Just a warning – keep an eye on the install drive for Veritas.   Letting the drive fill can result in a corrputed EMM database and Veritas forgetting things like the last year’s worth of backups.

So I ended up rebuilding both the master server and one of the media servers.

One thing that might come in handy. 

Mount a secondary volume as “C:\Program Files\VERITAS\Netbackup\db\images” and copy the original images catalog there.  This allows for massive growth plus the ability to expand the images database without having to reinstall veritas…(again).

Even Veritas said it was an interesting solution to the problem.  My goal was as much flexibility as possible going forward, because I have found out quite the hard way what happens when you don’t allow enough space to grow.  If the images catalog should fill up, it can going to cause the EMM (Enterprise Media Manager) database to corrupt itself..

So with the images catalog in-tact but the EMM database gone, you end up with a list of files and what tapes they’re on, but not a list of tapes, volume pools, EXPIRATION DATES, etc.

So the biggest problem with Veritas, is that their client-side encryption option, which is the standard deployment, negates the use of Veritas Bare-Metal-Restore (BMR).

For those who aren’t Veritas geeks like me, BMR is the handy-dandy application that allows you to rebuild a server from scratch using only a floppy (or bootable CD) with little or no input.  All of the particulars of a server are captured when it is backed up.  Drivers, hardware, IP settings, hostname, etc.  You then build a BMR boot disk for that server.  When it crashes and you have to replace it, you boot from the boot disk and it takes all the settings and builds a new server from the last backup from absolute scratch.

I’ve seen it work, it’s a miracle in the making.

However, if you’re using the Veritas client-side encryption, the key is managed by the client server.  And for some reason, this key is not included in the BMR boot disk that is generated by the BMR boot server.  This means that while it can start to rebuild the environment, it can’t restore the last backup because it can’t unencrypt it.

I’ve been looking at options, such as Decru’s Data-Fort inline FC encryption engine, as well as some of the options from Neoscale.

Both would have done the job nicely, however the prices quoted made selling these options up the river to those with the three-letter-initials painfull.

Now I find that Veritas has a recently released MSOE, or Media-Server-Encryption-Option.   Since the encryption is done at the media server, the BMR incompatibility is done away with, and lo and behold, everything works as advertised.  The only real down-side I think I can come up with is the increase in host-overhead on the media server, which means I may have to increase the number of media servers in the environment, which of course makes Veritas more expensive.

I’ve not gotten the quote on this, but I’m assuming it’s going to be less than the almost $50K some of the other options have come to.  I’ll let you know.

Just in case you don’t already do it, back-up your C:\Program Files\Veritas\Netbackup\bin directory before you apply MP4.

Unlike previous Maintenance Packs – this one will clobber any custom scripting you have done.

Not nice.