NBDeployUtil and Smart Meter: Enhanced support for virtual usage reporting with NetBackup 8.1.2 and 8.2 clients

Problem

If you install a NetBackup client inside a virtual machine and protect it using a non-hypervisor policy, the benefit of Flexible Licensing is not applicable. A policy type, such as Standard or MS-SQL-Server is part of “physical” workload and therefore, you cannot avail the benefit of Flexible Licensing.

The following table describes what constitutes as “physical” and “virtual” workloads.

Cause

This issue is caused because the categorization of “physical” versus “virtual” workloads is based on the “policy types”. NetBackup does not consider the actual machine type of a client being protected.

Solution

Following is the updated definition of workloads:

An Emergency Engineering Binary (EEB) containing a fix for this issue for NetBackup 8.1.2 is available by contacting Veritas technical support, referencing this document ID and Etrack 3999636.

If this issue is seen in NetBackup 8.2, contact Veritas technical support, with a reference to this document ID and Etrack ID 3999639.

Note that this EEB is supported only with the NetBackup 8.3 master server and NetBackup 8.1.2 or 8.2 clients.

The fix updates the following list of binaries. After applying the EEB, the Smart Meter can categorize the workload type based on the actual machine type.

On UNIX:

• bpcd
• nbhostdbcmd

On Windows:

•  bpcd.exe
• nbhostdbcmd.exe

This EEB also fixes the following limitation present on earlier versions of NetBackup client for VMware.

-        Machine type is not detected for the Solaris, Debian, and Ubuntu guest operating systems on VMware. Hence, the backup of these guest operating system is considered under a “physical” workload when the backup is run through a non-hypervisor policy.

Note: For VMware, the benefit that this EEB provides is also available with the earlier versions of NetBackup clients. You must use this EEB for VMware clients with Solaris, Debian, or Ubuntu guest operation system.

Install the EEB on NetBackup clients, which are virtual machines and protected using non-hypervisor policy types (such as Standard, MS-Windows, MS-SQL-Server and so on).