Manage Hosts

Note: This section is Applicable to migrations which involves NetBackup versions 8.1 and later.

Headline

NetBackup uses security certificates to authenticate NetBackup hosts. The security certificates conform to the X.509 Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) standard. A master server acts as the Certificate Authority (CA) and issues digital certificates to hosts. NetBackup 8.1 and later hosts can communicate with each other only in a securemode. NetBackup 8.1 hosts and later must have a Certificate Authority (CA) certificate and a host ID-based certificate for successful communication.For more details please refer to the NetBackup Security and Encryption guide.

So for catalog migrations between NetBackup 8.1 and later , CA Certificate and host ID certificates need to be deployed to all the NBU hosts from the destination master server. Tranzman has a brilliant feature named Host Management which does these deployments.Additionaly it also helps you to check the NBU connectivity within hosts so before switching to destination master server in production any connectivity issue could be highlighted and fixed.

You can access the Host Management from Tranzman UI under Actions->Host Management.Certificates is a vast thing in itself so to understand it better you do need to have some basic information information on how certificates actually work in NetBackup.

Follow the below steps to deploy the certificates from the destination master server to the NBU hosts :-

Step 1

Click on Actions->Host Management.Now as we are already in the data transfer stage all the NBU hosts should be discovered and should be displayed on the Host Management Page under Client Mangement. e.g. Figure 1 shows all the NBU hosts including media servers.

Figure1

Step 2

Select all the eligible NBU hosts then Actions -> Run origin connectivity test as shown in the below screenshot(Figure2) and hit . You would see couple of jobs being triggered named CheckConn under Views->Activity Monitor. Wait for them to complete and the respective columns on the Host Management page should get populated with rather than .

Figure2

Step 3

A successful connectivity test from origin should move the media servers to the Media Server Management tab(as shown in Figure 3) and only backup clients should be seen under Client Management(Figure 4). As it can be seen most of the columns are populated in Figure 4 , please refer to the below table to check what the respective column means in host management. Any unexpected in any column should be fixed before proceeding to next steps.

Name	Name of the NBU host
Actions	Selected actions for the NBU host
Version	Version of NetBackup
Active	State of Host (Active only if backup has ran in last 7 days)
Host props	NBU Host properties
Master	Current Master Server for NBU host
Accelerator	Accelerator Enabled/Disabled
Last scan	Time since last host management scan has been done
bpcd test
config test	NBU bpgetconfig test
1556 port	pbx port
13724 port	vnetd port
13782 port	bpcd port

Figure3

Figure4

Step 4

Now as shown in Figure 2 there are different actions which can be performed on NBU hosts. Below table shows all the Actions that can be performed on the NBU hosts.

Note: Do not select Update accelerator track-log destination, Remove origin from host properites,Make destination the master in host properties unless you are certain to use the NBU host with destination master server. Before running Push destination certificate ,reset the Netbackup security level for certificate deployment to Medium.

Action	Description
Run origin connectivity test	Runs a connectivity test for all the NBU hosts from the origin master server
Add destination to host properties	Add the destination master server name to bp.conf (*nix )or registry(Windows) on selected NBU hosts.
Update accelerator track-log destination	Updates the accelerator by forcing the new master server name in the track logs.
Push destination certificate	It adds the CA Certificate and host ID certificate from the destination master server to the selected NBU hosts.
Run destination connectivity	Runs a connectivity test for all the NBU hosts the destination master server
Remove origin from host properites	Deletes the master server name from bp.conf (*nix) or registry(Windows) on selected NBU hosts
Make destination the master in host properties	In case when there are both origin and destination master server name in bp.conf(*nix) or registry(Windows) selecting and running this option will promote the destination master server name over origin.

Follow the above steps for any Action to be performed in Host Management and fix any unexpected .

Note: Connecitivity test in Actions always take precedence before any other Action, be it from the origin or destination master server.