About the document

This document provides support limitations for IPv6 in NetBackup. It also provides a few important notes and recommendations that you need to know before you configure IPv6 in the NetBackup environment.

For IPv6-specific known issues, refer to the NetBackup Release Notes.

http://www.veritas.com/docs/DOC5332

Important notes regarding IPv6 support

Review the following important notes:

• The IP_ADDRESS_FAMILY option on a NetBackup host must be set to AF_UNSPEC to support IPv6 communication.

For more details on the IP_ADDRESS_FAMILY option, refer to the NetBackup Administrator's Guide Volume I.
http://www.veritas.com/docs/DOC5332

• NetBackup prefers to communicate over IPv4 where both IPv4 and IPv6 communication channels exist. If you want to force NetBackup to use IPv6-only communication on a dual stack host, use the preferred network setting. For more details, refer to the following article:

https://www.veritas.com/support/en_US/article.100037945.html

• Use of IPv6 hexadecimal addresses in NetBackup - NetBackup does not support the use of IPv6 addresses (for example: 2001:db8:85a3:8d3:1319:8a2e:370:7348) where you are able to specify a host name. If a host name is required, NetBackup does not support the use of an IPv6 address, even though host names can resolve to IPv6 addresses through DNS, local hosts files, or other means.
• In IPv6-enabled NetBackup 8.1.1 and later environments, Granular Recovery Technology (GRT) is supported.
• IPv4 loopback address (127.0.0.1) must exist on all NetBackup hosts (including IPv6-only) hosts. You should not uninstall IPv4 stack completely on IPv6-only NetBackup hosts. For example: On Windows hosts, you should not uninstall IPv4 stack by executing the netsh interface ipv4 uninstall command.

Recommendations

Review the following recommendation:

• Veritas recommends that you configure the networking stack on the master server so it is compatible with the networking stacks of other NetBackup hosts. Consider the following examples:
• • If all clients and media servers are configured to be IPv6-only, the master server should either be in an IPv6-only or in a dual stack configuration.
  • If some clients are configured to be IPv6-only and some clients are configured to be IPv4-only, the master server should have dual stack configuration.

If a client and the master server have incompatible network configurations, the following operations fail:

Note: In demilitarized zone (DMZ) configurations, NetBackup clients cannot directly communicate with the master server. Such configurations continue to be supported.

IPv6 support limitations matrix

The section provides support limitations for NetBackup platforms, components, and workloads with respect to IPv6 environment.

Note: The platforms, components, and workloads that are not listed in the following tables are supported on both IPv6-only and dual stack machines.

Platforms

NetBackup components

Notes on IPv6 support for BMR

Bare Metal Restore (BMR) provides protection to clients that can communicate over an IPv4-only network, an IPv6-only network, or a dual stack IPv4-IPv6 network. BMR recovery is yet supported only over IPv4 network as many NW boot protocols are not supported over IPv6 channel. In addition, when you configure a BMR database with the bmrsetupmaster command, the BMR master server IPv4 address needs to be enabled and able to resolve with the master server host name. Once bmrsetupmaster runs successfully, you can bring the IPv4 address down if you only want to use the IPv6 address.

During the BMR restore time, the master server and the media servers need to have IPv4 addresses up.

Example

A bmrsetupmaster may fail while BMR resolves its master's IPv4 address during its record creation into BMR database. As the BMR database creation fails, the BMR master does not function. To resolve this issue, make sure an IPv4-based IP of the master server is enabled and can be resolved using the NetBackup master server name before you run the bmrsetupmaster command.

BMR backup is fully supported on an IPv6 network channel, however, the BMR restore works only with IPv4 channel.

NetBackup workloads

* In the case of workloads that do not support IPv6-only and dual stack configurations, the associated media server must be configured with either dual stack or IPv4-only configuration.