Sunday, December 9, 2007

Symantec - Veritas backup exec 11 second impression

When backup exec 11 first came out I had been ready to upgrade to it right up until I read the message boards. The boards were full of hate and frustration due to bugs, lack of exchange 2007 support, the recent shift of tech support to somewhere in BFE, and the breaking of many features that used to work when it was still veritas. So a year and a service pack and a few hotfixes later, I'm taking the plunge. Their license management site gave some minor difficulties but overall wasn't as bad as my previous experiences with it.
Installation breezed through and the LiveUpdate window was a welcome change from the old patch system. Once I confirmed that all my backup jobs were still there I uncrossed my fingers and started upgrading the remote agents. They've added a new remote agent utility which adds a GUI to the remote agent and publishes current IP and port information back to the media servers at regular intervals. Hopefully this'll make it easier for it to keep track of servers outside the firewall or in the dmz.
All in all I'm cautiously optimistic about this upgrade.

** If you're upgrading exchange 2k7 to SP1, pay close attention to the readme when it talks about remote streaming support. I've seen this pop up on some of the boards with backup exec and exch 2k7 when doing individual mailbox restores.


**Update** Had some weirdness with the jobs that were scheduled from policies. I deleted the jobs from the policies menu and recreated them so we'll see if it works better tonight.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

We just loaded backup exec 11 on one of our servers and our Outlook Client rule stopped working. We stopped the backup exec service for a day and the client rule worked fine. Is there a fix or work around? Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks.

Gnawgnu said...

That's pretty odd. I'd expect Endpoint 11 to affect outlook but not backup exec. Is the outlook client actually running on a server? Or is it a backup exec agent on the exchange server affecting the server side rules? You may want to submit that one to symantec or experts-exchange.com