Veritas NetBackup 8.1 is GA - what's new and my favorite features

By | May 27, 2018

Veritas released a new version of their core product - NetBackup 8.1. This version provides some interesting features however not for VMware. There are only a few improvements such as the possibility to select virtual drives with a new recovery UI, support for non-ASCII characters in VMware.

My favourite features are:

  • Auto Image Replication Enhancements

Fortunately, NetBackup 8.1 introduces a new import confirmation feature that is related to targeted A.I.R. operations. When using targeted A.I.R., storage lifecycle (SLP) processing of each replicated image is paused in the source domain until a message has been received from the target domain that confirms that the image has been imported successfully. This feature ensures that source domain images remain in place at least until those images have been safely imported in the target domain.

  • Better security

I can see that Veritas started to focus on NetBackup security. NetBackup 8.0 introduced certificates for NBU environment. Master Server assigns Certificates to Clients based on UUID and it makes sure that communications between Clients and Masters are trusted. NetBackup 8.1 provides better security for clients located in a demilitarized zone (DMZ). The media server creates an HTTP tunnel to enable secure web service communication between NetBackup clients and the master server.

  • New supported solutions

NetBackup 8.1 introduces a new type of policy - BigData. The policy allows to back up big data applications like Hadoop and hyper-converged systems like Nutanix Acropolis Hypervisor (AHV). There is also available a database-aware backup of MySQL database.

  • Instant recovery for Oracle (when NBU Appliance is used)

Now, it is possible to mount Oracle database directly from NetBackup Appliance. This is the next nice feature after introducing Copilot for Oracle.

There are some additional features:

  • NetBackup Virtual Appliance for the standard data centre - this is a virtual machine (provided as an ova file) that can be used to backup data not only in ROBO (introduced in 8.0) but also data centres. It means that also the previous limitation (max 2TB Front end licensed and 2TB Backend Storage) is already changed.
  • NetBackup Accelerator for EMC Isilon - Accelerator is a great feature and now it is possible to use for Isilon filers.

There are a lot of improvements or support for cloud (e.g. CloudCatalyst ), end of support some OS or features (e.g. SYMCquiesce utility for Linux virtual machines). For more information please follow the Release Notes.

Useful resources:

Author: Mariusz

Architect (~ 15 years experience based on passion...) with strong background as a System Administrator and Engineer. Focused on Data Center Solutions: Virtualization/Cloud Computing and Storage/Backup Systems. Currently living in Poland.