The Symantec engineers handling my currently open support cases have informed me that Backup Exec 2014 is out, and wouldn't I just try and upgrade in the hope that it might resolve the issues in question.
Frankly, I'm scared.
It took me nine months, half a dozen support cases, and countless posts to this honorable forum to get Backup Exec 2012 into a shape where I can say with conviction that I "have backups". I certainly don't want to repeat that experience. In fact I cannot afford to.
On the other hand, there are a couple of issues left which I would love to see fixed, including but not limited to the still open support cases, and I see most of these heading inexorably towards the "upgrade to BE 2014 or live with it" resolution, if not already there.
Is there already experience with upgrading from BE 2012 to 2014? What should I prepare myself for? How much time and manpower do I need to budget? Is there a step by step description of the upgrade process I can check in advance for problematic steps and necessary downtimes? What about the dreaded HCL and SCL? Is there a list of hardware and software for which support has been dropped? What is my way to back out in case the whole endeavour turns catastrophic?
Media server configuration:
- Backup Exec 2012 Service Pack 4
- Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 Standard
- Cisco UCS C22 M3S V02, dual Xeon E5-2440 quad core, 16 GB RAM
- LSI MegaRAID with six 1 TB S-ATA disks in RAID5 configuration als local disk storage
- Tandberg T24 LTO-5 changer connected to LSI SAS controller as main tape library
- Tandberg standalone LTO-5 drive connected to Emulex FibreChannel controller as secondary tape drive
Backed up servers:
- one VMware ESXi 5.5 HA cluster
- one virtual Windows Server 2008 R2 server (running on the VMware cluster but backed up separately through RAWS because Backup Exec 2012 AVVI cannot cope with a 2 TB disk)
- one physical Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 server
- itself