Automated NetBackup SLP management
When you configure primary service replication between two NetBackup Flex Scale clusters, the NetBackup primary service catalog data is replicated between the clusters. You have to configure NetBackup Storage Lifecycle Policies (SLPs) for backup policies and protection plans to duplicate data between the two NetBackup Flex Scale clusters. You also must update the SLPs, backup policies, and protection plans if there is a cluster fault and the replication primary role needs to be changed to failover the NetBackup primary service.
NetBackup Flex Scale supports a mechanism to update the SLPs, backup policies, and protection plans automatically when changing the replication roles after a cluster fault. However, this functionality works only if the SLPs, backup policies and protection plans are using the default Media Server Deduplication Pool storage unit (STU) that is created with the NetBackup Flex Scale cluster configuration. This STU is named stu_<storage_server_fqdn>. If you use the default STU as storage target for your SLPs, backup policies and protection plans, you can select the option when changing replication roles.
Note:
The option is available only when the current replication primary cluster is down and the operation is performed on the replication secondary.
If you select the option, the following changes are performed on the NetBackup primary server:
Backup policies and protection plans that are not using SLPs and are using default STU as backup target:
If the STU is from the faulted NetBackup Flex Scalecluster, it is updated to use the default STU on the new replication primary.
Backup policies and protection plans that are using SLPs with default STU as backup and duplication target:
If the STU used by the backup target is from the faulted NetBackup Flex Scale cluster, it is updated to use the default STU on the new replication primary. The duplication target is updated to use the STU from the faulted NetBackup Flex Scale cluster.
Backup policies and protection plans that are using replication template SLPs:
The following SLP templates are created while configuring primary service replication.
<cluster1>_7days_to_<cluster2>_7days
<cluster1>_30days_to_<cluster2>_30days
<cluster2>_7days_to_<cluster1>_7days
<cluster2>_30days_to_<cluster1>_30days
Here, the first cluster name in the SLP is the backup target and the second cluster name in the SLP is the duplication target. The number of days reflects the retention period of the backup copy on each cluster.
If the backup policies and protection plans are using the template SLPs from cluster1 to cluster2, they are updated to use the corresponding template SLP in the reverse direction if cluster1 is faulted and vice versa.
All of these changes are applied only to newly created NetBackup jobs. Existing, running, and queued backup jobs continue to use the previous backup and duplication targets.
The behavior of the automatic option is to make sure that backup jobs continue to function after a cluster fault. The duplication is reversed to let the backup images duplicated to the remote cluster when the cluster fault is restored.
All the changes to SLPs, backup policies, and protection plans are reverted back to their original configuration when the cluster fault is restored and the original replication primary automatically gets converted as the replication secondary.