Veritas Flex Appliance Getting Started and Administration Guide

The following list contains the notes and the known issues that apply for the Flex Appliance 1.3 software:

• When you create a NetBackup media server instance, the Flex Appliance Console does not prevent entering the same hostname in both the Hostname for NetBackup Media Server and the Master server hostname fields, but that configuration is not supported. You must have a preexisting master server with a different hostname.

• The following NetBackup features are not supported on application instances:

  • Bare Metal Restore

  • NFS mounts

  • IPv6

  • OpenStorage plug-ins

• The Flex Appliance Shell allows you to log in using the IP address that you set for the Flex Appliance Console. Do not log in with the console IP address. You must always use the node IP address to log in to the Flex Appliance Shell.

• If an appliance node is powered off unexpectedly and then turned back on, an issue can occur that causes the Flex Appliance Console and all application instances to stop working. The Flex Appliance Shell displays the following error when you attempt to log in:

  Installation status: failed

  If you encounter this issue, contact Veritas Technical Support for assistance. Ask your representative to reference article 100046737.

• If you add a node to a 5340 appliance, a known issue with the Qlogic FC adapter can cause the operation to fail.

  If your attempt to add a node fails, restart the node that you were trying to add and retry the operation. If the issue persists, contact Veritas Technical Support for assistance. Ask your representative to review the var/log/messages log on the node.

• When you create a bond, do not give it a bond name that is all numbers. If you do so, you can no longer create any additional bonds on the appliance.

  If you were not aware of this limitation and have already created a bond name that is all numbers, contact Technical Support for assistance. Ask your representative to reference article 100046604.

• If you edit the MTU value of a network interface, the change is not preserved if the node restarts. If you need to change the MTU value permanently, contact Veritas Technical Support and ask your representative to reference article 100046433.

• If you upgrade an instance that supports rollback, the rollback may lead to inconsistencies between the NetBackup catalog and the media servers for all jobs that ran after the upgrade. These inconsistencies can affect future backups.

  See Warnings and considerations for instance rollbacks.

• If you remove a node from a multi-node appliance and then perform a factory reset on the node that you removed, the factory reset may fail with the following error:

  Installing VxOS (Note - May take up to 15 minutes) [FAILED]
  
  Task Name: Generating boot configuration
  Error:
  "AnsibleUndefinedVariable: 'kernel_map' is undefined"
  

  If you encounter this issue, you must reimage the node instead of performing the factory reset. Contact Veritas Technical Support and ask your representative to reference article 100044669.

• The following error message may display in the Flex Appliance Shell during an upgrade or a factory reset:

  dracut:Failed to install module bnx2

  This message displays in error and can be safely disregarded.

• If you attempt to upgrade Flex Appliance to this release when an instance operation is in progress or pending, the upgrade precheck fails with the following incorrect error message:

  "Error: VUF failed to install package."

  If you see this message, check the status of all instance operations and wait until they are complete before you try again. If an instance upgrade is pending, you must commit or roll back that upgrade before you can upgrade the appliance.

• If an instance rollback fails on a single-node appliance, and then you restart the appliance node, an issue can occur that causes the Flex Appliance Console to be unable to connect, and none of the application instances start. This issue does not apply to multi-node appliances.

  If you encounter this issue, contact Veritas Technical Support and ask your representative to reference article 100046738.

• If any of your application instances have EEBs installed on them, those EEBs are removed when you upgrade to version 1.3. To keep the EEBs, perform the following steps:

  • Before the upgrade:

    Log in to each application instance as the appadmin user and run the following command:

    ls -l /opt/veritas/add-ons/

    Take note of each EEB that appears in the output. For example:

    drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Jan  2 10:46 eeb-3956103

  • After the upgrade:

    Using the information that you noted in the previous step, reinstall the add-ons on each application instance. You do not need to add them to the repository first.

    See Installing application add-ons.

• If you roll back the appliance after an upgrade and then start an instance, the start instance task may continue for up to an hour even after the instance started successfully. During this time, other instance operations or an appliance upgrade may fail. If you encounter this issue, wait an hour and then retry the failed operation.

• If you upgrade from version 1.1 to version 1.2 and then upgrade to 1.3, you must commit the upgrade to version 1.2 before you begin the upgrade to version 1.3. If the previous version has not been committed, the upgrade fails.

  If you were not aware of this issue and have encountered the upgrade failure, run the system upgrade-commit command to commit to version 1.2, then retry the upgrade to version 1.3. If you experience additional issues, contact Veritas Technical Support for assistance.

• If you upgrade to version 1.3 and then roll back, an issue can occur that causes the rollback to hang. The Flex Appliance Shell login page shows a banner that says "Completed," but none of the instances are online.

  If the rollback does not complete within two hours, run the following command to confirm that the instances are offline:

  show instance running-instances

  If no instances are running, restart the node to complete the rollback process.

• If there are multiple upgrade packages in the repository and you upgrade to version 1.3, the upgrade precheck fails, and the appliance enters a failed upgrade state. An error banner displays in the Flex Appliance Console, and some operations such as creating an instance are blocked. 

  To avoid this issue, make sure that you only have one upgrade package in the repository when you upgrade.

  If you were not aware of this issue and encounter it, remove the additional upgrade packages and try the upgrade again. Full operations are restored after the upgrade is committed or rolled back.

• If you upgrade a node and elect not to restart it when prompted, the node must be restarted with the 'restart' command to complete the upgrade. If the node is restarted incorrectly due to a power outage, pressing the power button, or a similar scenario, the remaining upgrade steps fail.

  If you encounter this issue, roll back the node to the previous version and then re-run the upgrade.

• If you have a multi-node appliance and one of the nodes is turned off for any reason, do not restart the other node until they are both online. If a node is restarted while the other node is off, the Flex Appliance Console fails to load.

  If you encounter this scenario, contact Veritas Technical Support and ask your representative to reference article 100046118.

• Simultaneous multithreading (smt) is enabled by default on the Veritas 5340 Appliance. Note that the following vulnerabilities affect this feature:

  • CVE-2018-12130

  • CVE-2018-12126

  • CVE-2018-12127

  • CVE-2019-11091

  You can disable smt to address these vulnerabilities; however, if smt is disabled, backup performance is reduced by up to 60%. If you want to disable smt, contact Veritas Technical Support and ask your representative to reference article 100046154.

• When you create an instance, if you enter the IP address before you select a network interface, the IP address field displays the following error message:

  "IP address does not belong to the selected network's netmask."

  This message still displays after you select the network interface that corresponds to the IP address. To clear the message, click inside the IP address field and then click or tab outside of it.

• After some operations in the Flex Appliance Shell, an "Operation successfully" message may display even if a failure occurred. Read all of the messages that display at the end of each task to make sure that no further action is required.

• The log view under the 'show instance performance' command does not show logs for your application instances or some of the infrastructure instances. To see logs for a NetBackup application instance, log in to the instance and navigate to /mnt/nblogs.

• When you upload a file to the repository, the upload fails if the file name includes a space or parentheses (). If you encounter this issue, remove the space or parentheses and try again.

• If you use the set alerts email-hardware or set alerts email-software command to add an email address for Call Home, you may see an error message similar to the following:

  [Error] The appliance was able to connect to your SMTP server, but either we were not able to authenticate properly, or your SMTP server is preventing us from sending emails through it. Please check your SMTP server for details.

  V-475-2-1006 : Added email example@veritas.com not usable with SMTP server.

  However, the messages also states that the address was added successfully, as follows:

  Email address(es) added successfully 1. example@veritas.com

  If you encounter this message, the email address was added to the appliance successfully, but the test email did not go through. Verify the email address, Sender ID, and SMTP password that you entered on the appliance. If they are all correct, check the settings on your SMTP server.

• The set appliance migrate command does not apply to the 5150 appliance, even though it exists in the Flex Appliance Shell.

• If you see an error message similar to the following in this release, it can usually be safely ignored:

  kernel:NMI watchdog: BUG: soft lockup - CPU#5 stuck for 23s! [<process>:1]

  Where <process> is the name of any Flex Appliance process.

  If the message persists for an extended period of time, contact Veritas Technical Support to troubleshoot.

• If Call Home is enabled but cannot communicate with the AutoSupport server due to a firewall, the set alerts email-smtp and delete alerts email-smtp commands may take more than a minute to complete. Resolve the firewall issue or disable Call Home to remove the delay.

• The NetBackup 8.2 application does not support NetBackup notify scripts and therefore does not support the cp-nbu-notify utility. If an existing instance uses these scripts and you upgrade it to 8.2, the scripts no longer work.

• It is not currently possible to edit a network bond after it has been created. If you need to edit a bond, you must delete it and then create a new bond with the new settings.

  See Deleting a network bond.

  See Creating a network bond.

• If more than one user edits the network of an instance from the Flex Appliance Console at the same time, the second user's changes overwrite the first user's changes.

• IP forwarding is enabled in the Flex Appliance kernel by design; it is used to facilitate network communication between application instances and external networks.

• If the VLAN tags do not match between the nodes of a multi-node appliance, the following error appears when you attempt to relocate an instance:

  Failed to clear the fault on <network_interface> on <node_hostname>. Check /log/hostagent.log and VCS logs for more details.

  However, these logs do not include any additional details. If you encounter this issue, check the VLAN tags on the appliance from the Settings > Network page. Verify that all of the VLAN tags have been added on both nodes.

• When you create a media server instance with MSDP storage, you must tune the NetBackup parameters after you create the storage servers, and you may need to resize the MSDP storage partition. Make sure that you follow all of the steps that are listed in this document for creating a media server instance.

  See Creating a NetBackup media server instance.

• If you run any of the system hardware-health commands in the Flex Appliance Shell immediately after starting or restarting the appliance, you may see the following error message:

  Unable to retrieve hardware information.
  

  If you see this error, wait a few minutes and try again. This issue also applies during initial configuration, after you run the setup configure-network command.

• The Flex Appliance Shell does not currently support changing host network settings other than the DNS and Hosts file settings after initial configuration has been completed. If you need to change any of the other host network settings, you must perform a factory reset and then restart the initial configuration process.