Remove Backup Exec 2012 Licenses

In Backup Exec 2012, you can’t remove the product license from “Install Optoins and Licenses on this Backup Exec Server”, you can however remove the maintenance for any products you have installed.

If you want to remove the product license, you will need to do perform a number of steps.

First off you should stop all services for Backup Exec

Run Backup Exec Services Manager from “C:\Program Files\Symantec\Backup Exec\ServicesMgr.exe” and click “Stop all services”

Once the services have stopped, navigate to either of the following file locations depending on your OS

Windows Server 2008 and Above

C:\ Program Data\Symantec Shared\Licenses and C:\Users\All Users\Symantec Shared\Licenses

Windows Server 2003

C:\Program Files\Common Files\ Symantec Shared\Licenses

Delete the .SLF files from the following location from either of the above file locations, these are the license files for Backup Exec.

After you have deleted the files, you must restart the Backup Exec services again.

If you have any questions, comments or suggestions, please let me know by leaving a message or hitting me up on twitter.

@PCVirus_AU
Titan Solutions

Configuring Backup Exec 2010 R3 and IBM TS3200 Tape Library Configuration

*This is a repost of a older blog post on my personal WordPress site*

Sometimes you think “This should be pretty simple” and “I know how Backup Exec works, I’ve configured it dozens of times in the past”, but you know what? You’re wrong!

Adding a tape library really makes a big difference compared to how you would normally configure a 1 tape drive system.

While I’m not going to go into all the configuration details in this blog (that’s something to go through in my technical blog), I’m going to state a couple of things that should maybe make sense but don’t always.

TS3100 and TS3200 have 2 different modes for controlling the medium changer, those are;

1. Random
2. Sequential

Random should be set when you want the software to control the medium changer and Sequential when you want the hardware to manager the changer. Makes sense right? Yeah I though so too. Having it set to sequential will make the medium changer disappear from Windows device manager as well so that’s something to keep in mind (it needs to be in Windows device manager for Backup Exec to see it).

While it may not happen for everyone, I also experienced what happens when you have the Eject tape after completion option ticked in Backup Exec 2010 R3, and that is it causes the library to lock up and needs a reboot to get it back into working order. Great huh? Granted that the device doesn’t have a mechanism for ejecting the tapes out of the library, but seriously.

Having a bad tape in the library also caused it to lock up and become unresponsive, so that’s another trip to the server room and a reboot of the library.

Now that I have ironed out these errors and I understand how it all works, I can say with %100 confidence that the system is running correctly. I just need to clean out the old media sets and make sure that the correct tapes backup at the correct time. Once all the tapes go through there first run it should all be fine.

All in all, throughout all the frustration and stress due to production backups not working properly at least I can say that at least I learnt from the experience I will definitely know for the future.

If you have any questions, comments or suggestions, please let me know by leaving a message or hitting me up on twitter.

@PCVirus_AU
Titan Solutions

How To: Clear download cache in Symantec LiveUpdate

If you suspect that you might have a corrupt update downloaded from Symantec LiveUpdate, or just because you want to clear all update downloads out of your system, you can do this from inside LiveUpdate.

When you first load LiveUpdate, click “options” and then “configure”.

Select the “Update Cache” tab

Click on “Remove All Files From Cache”

Once completed you will get the following message box indicating that it has successfully deleted files from download cache.

If you have no files to delete in the download cache, the “Remove All Files From Cache” button will be greyed out.

And that’s all there is too it.

If you have any questions, comments or suggestions, please let me know by leaving a message or hitting me up on twitter.

@PCVirus_AU
Titan Solutions

Backup Exec 2012 – An attempt to take a snapshot of a virtual machine failed because it was unable to quiesce an application

Over the weekend one of my backup jobs failed. This job backs up a number of virtual machines in vCenter to tape.

What had happened was that while doing a snapshot for one of the servers, it took longer then expected and timed out.

First off, you will need to check your installed updates, you can do this by clicking on the Backup Exec menu button, and then going to “Installation and Licensing” and then “Installed Updates”

The Hotfix you need to make sure that is installed in “Hotfix 199866”. Once this is installed you can go on to make the required registry changes.

Next shutdown the Backup Exec services by running the “Backup Exec Services Manager” from “C:\Program Files\Symantec\Backup Exec\ServicesMgr.exe” or whatever your install location is.

Click “Stop all services” to…. um, stop all services

Once the services have stopped. load up regedit32.exe and navigate to “HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Symantec\Backup Exec for Windows\Backup Exec\Engine\VMWare Agent “

You will need to create the following keys:

1. “Snapshot retry interval” value data = 60
2. “Snapshot retry attempts” value data = 5
3. “Use hybrid snapshot method” value data = 1

All keys are DWORD (32-bit), set to Hexadecimal and are case sensitive.

Once you have made the registry changes reboot the server for good measure and your done.

The increase in attempts and the retry interval should be long enough to fix the timeout problem when Backup Exec is creating snapshots in vCenter.

If you have any questions, comments or suggestions, please let me know by leaving a message or hitting me up on twitter.

@PCVirus_AU
Titan Solutions

Backup Exec Deduplication Assessment Tool

If your a Symantec partner, you have access to the Backup Exec Deduplication Assessment Tool. The Backup Exec Deduplication Assessment Tool (BEDAT) can be run to show your customers the benefits of the deduplication option in Backup Exec 2012.

BEDAT is available for partners to download at the Symantec PartnerNet site. If you are an end user interested in seeing how deduplication can be of benefit to your environment, please contact a local Symantec partner.

BEDAT is a stand alone executable that will install a temporary deduplication agent to any servers selected in the assessment process.

To select servers to include in the deduplication assessment, click on “Add Server”, this will open a Add Server window box.

You can also tick the “Include this local Server for deduplication assessment” if you want to include the local server (Obviously).

When adding a server, you can either type in the server name or IP address, or browse the network and add your servers that way. Once you has selected your server, you will need to provide the logon credentials for that server so it can access and install the temporary deduplication agent on this server.

Once you have added the servers you want to run the tool on, click next to continue

When selecting your resources, you can select all resources or specify which drives on which servers you want to analyse.

You will also need to make sure that you have at least 1GB of free disk space for every 1TB of data you’re scanning. You can browse or type in a new folder path for the storage of the deduplication temporary data.

Depending on how much data you need to analyse, the assessment progress can take anything from several minutes to several hours.

Once complete, you can specify the storage information, the backup strategy is either Weekly Full with Daily incremental or Daily Full Backups. The data retention period can be set to weeks, months or years.

You can also fill in your partner information, which will be included in the report.

On this final screen, you can enlarge the view of the report, print or save it. The file is saved as an XPS file

The report is broken down into 4 sections, Overall Storage Savings, Storage Savings by Resources, Storage Savings by Servers and Deduplication Failures by Servers.

As you can see by the report, this assessment shows that I can save 68.8% or 27GB of savings on storage. The backup data size can be reduced from 39 GB down to 12 GB with deduplication. It also shows the deduplication ratio which is 3.2:1 in this case.

The next 3 sections shows a more detailed breakdown of the overall savings, including the deduplication rate per server.

There is was deduplication failures in this assessment.

The very last section of the report is a list of the Backup Exec Deduplication Option requirements.

If you have any questions, comments or suggestions, please let me know by leaving a message or hitting me up on twitter.

@PCVirus_AU
Titan Solutions

Virtual Machine Backup and Recovery: Five Critical Decisions

Mays Google+ Hangout by Symantec Backup Exec is on the 5 critical decisions when considering a backup and recovery solution and based on whitepaper by Mahmoud Magdy, Thomas Maurer and Mikko Mykyri.

The paper is intended for IT Architects, Backup and Recovery Administrators, and virtualization teams at medium size through Enterprise-scale organizations.

The hosts of the hangout are:

Matt Stephenson (@PackMatt73) Product Marketing Manager; Social Media

Mahmoud Magdy (@_busbar) Senior Technical Architect, Exchange Server MVP, BExpert
Thomas Maurer (@ThomasMaurer) Cloud Architect, Microsoft MVP
Mikko Mykyri (@BackupMikko) VMware vExpert 2012, Backup Exec Product Manager

Important links:

@BackupExec
Be Busbared (Blog)
thomasmaurer (Blog)
Mikko Nykyri  (Blog)
Backup and Recovery Five Critical Decisions Whitepaper

The Hangout

You can click on the links to jump to that part of the hangout.

1. Agent based vs Agentless
   
2. Purpose built virtual domain backup tool or unified data protection?
   
3. Managing deduplication: Why, where and how?
   
4. Managing the recovery trade-off
   
5. Performance, reliability and manageability at future scale
   

If you have any questions regarding this hangout, hit up Matt on twitter (@PackMatt73) or use #SYMChangout and he will get back to you

@PCVirus_AU
Titan Solutions

A good hard look at the Backup Exec 3600 Appliance

On the 27th of April 2013, the Backup Exec guys hosted another hangout, this time about their new Backup Exec 3600 Appliance.

This was a great hangout that really broke down what the 3600 appliance is and does.

Unfortunately there was a brief drop out of Google Hangouts for about 20 seconds at the 22:44 mark

My main take away from the whole thing was how easy it is to install and get backing up, 33 minutes! (and that includes 5 minutes for unpacking and 18 minutes for rebooting)

The hosts of the hangout are:

Matt Stephenson (@PackMatt73) Product Marketing Manager; Social Media
John Damon, Product Marketing Manager; Backup Exec 3600 Appliance
Michael Gallagher, Product Manager; Backup Exec 3600 Appliance
Mike Garcia

Important links:

@SYMCPartners
@BackupExec
The Symantec Backup Exec 3600 Appliance- evaluating the Out-of-Box Experience

The Hangout

You can click on the links to jump to that part of the hangout.

Backup and Recovery Got you Down?

Licensing

Licensing Link: http://www.symantec.com/docs/HOWTO59010

Appliance Overview

Intel Relationship

Essential Protection Suite vs Total Protection Suite

Google Hangouts drop out 

Google Hangouts resumes

Under the hood

Out of box experience

P2V conversion

Deduplication

Scenarios

1. Single Site
   
2. Sister Site and Remote Office
   
3. Virtual Environment
   

If you have any questions regarding this hangout, hit up Matt on twitter (@PackMatt73) or use #SYMChangout and he will get back to you

@PCVirus_AU
Titan Solutions

Announcing the Hangout with Backup Exec 2012 Engineers series

Backup Exec has just announced that they are starting a series of Google+ Hangouts with Backup Exec 2012 engineers starting Wednesday 12th June 2013, starting at 1pm EDT, which makes it about 3am Thursday morning Australian Eastern Standard Time.

I think this is a great way to get your questions answered by the guys who really know BE better then anyone else and I am sure that if you support Backup Exec you have some questions or ideas that you would like to pass onto the engineers.

Below is the info from Facebook and Google+

Are you a Backup Exec user?  Do you ever have wild ideas about how you could better use this solution?  Ever run into a technical issue?  How would you feel about Hanging Out for an hour with a Systems Engineer & a Technical Support Engineer to go through whatever is on your mind regarding Backup Exec?
Backup Exec is pleased to announce a series of Google+ Hangouts beginning Wednesday 12 June at 1.00 pm EDT/10.00 am EDT
These hangouts will be open forums with customers, partners, and employees addressing any questions or concerns regarding Backup Exec 2012.  Our featured technical experts will be Systems Engineer Travis Larson and Technical Support Engineer Michael McNally.  They will be here to take your questions and suggestions and talk with you about all things Backup Exec.
Come Hangout with us.  Like Bill Cosby said “if you’re not careful, you may learn something before it’s done.”

Make sure you click on the Google+ Event Invite and say your going to attend!

@PCVirus_AU
Titan Solutions

Things I’ve Learnt from Implementing Backup Exec 2012 Deduplication

This week I’ve been working on changing the backup solution for a client from Symantec System Recovery + Backup Exec 2012 to Backup Exec 2012 with Deduplication.

While this sounds like it would be a simple process of installing the BE agents and disabling the SSR backups, it turns out that there is still some ticks you can employ. I’m going to go through what I have learnt during the week and hopefully it will assist others with any of these issues in the future.

Backing Up the Media Server

If you are going to backup the media server, there is a couple of things you are going to need to consider first.

• Do NOT backup the deduplication volume
• Do NOT backup the system state

To exclude the dedup volume, its as simple as editing the backup selection options for the server and de-select that volume.

To exclude the system state, edit the backup selection options, expand Shadow Copy Components, User Data, and de-select Backup Exec Deduplication Storage. If this is the only option under Shadow Copy Components, you can de-select it at that level.

After you do all of this and complete a deduplication you will receive a warning that you have backed up to a local deduplication storage device, this is only a warning, and you can ignore it as you should duplicate to tape for off site backup anyway.

Backing Up Physical Servers

When backing up the physical Windows servers I have found I get the best results from configuring the snapshot to use the Microsoft Volume Shadow Copy Server (Windows 2003 and later), and then selecting to use the System snapshot provider. I also disabled the checkpoint restart.

 

Virtual Servers

Unfortunately virtual servers weren’t on the schedule this time round, but that should be coming up sometime in the future and I’ll post my tips here when that happens.

In the meantime I suggest that if you are having problems with deduplication and virtual machines I suggest reaching out to the Backup Exec guys at:

@BackupExec on Twitter or #BackupExec
Symantec on Google+
Symantec Connect Fourms

If you have any questions, comments or suggestions, please let me know by leaving a message or hitting me up on twitter.

@PCVirus_AU
Titan Solutions

So what, exactly, is this Backup Exec V-Ray Edition?–Recap

 

This months Google+ hangout with the Backup Exec team is all about V-Ray edition of Backup Exec.

The hosts of the hangout are:

Matt Stephenson, Product Marketing Manager; Social Media (@PackMatt73)

and

Scott Baker, Product Manager (@PScottBaker)

Important links:

@SYMCPartners
@BackupExec
Download Backup Exec V-Ray edition – http://www.symantec.com/backup-exec-vray-edition

The Hangout

You can click on the links to jump to that part of the hangout.

What does ‘per processor’ licensing mean?

What features are included in the Backup Exec V-Ray Edition?

How does the Backup Exec V-Ray Edition work in a virtual and physical environment?

Licensing Scenarios for Backup Exec 2012 V-Ray Edition

Scenario 2

Scenario 3

Scenario 4

How you can get V-Ray for free!

Symantec is giving Microsoft MVPs and VMware vExperts the opportunity to get V-Ray for free. Click the links below to apply.

If your a vExpert you can apply here for your free supported for 1 year copy of Backup Exec V-Ray Edition

Microsoft MVPs can apply here for your free supported for 1 year copy of Backup Exec V-Ray Edition

@PCVirus_AU
Titan Solutions