After discovering that the brand-new LSI Logic SCSI controller was LVD SCSI whereas the Qualstar 4000 series robot with its Sony AIT-2 drives was HVD and replacing the SCSI controller, NetBackup 3.4 was installed on the Windows server. Even though Windows found the robot and its tape drives just fine, NetBackup's tpautoconf complained that an attempted SCSI_IOCTL_CAPABILITIES probe had failed. A lengthy series of patches were applied, all to no avail.

In the end some googling and a few years of experience led us to conclude that the root cause here lay in the fact that we were running Windows 2003 which has a different driver architecture when it comes to SCSI devices. Time to punt, and, even though we cannot talk to any devices yet, upgrade to 4.5.

During all this the hunt for a compatibility matrix on the Veritas website is finally successful and it shows that even NetBackup 4.5 is not supported on Windows 2003 until Maintenance/Feature pack 3. This fits with the facts as the newly upgraded 4.5 version of tpautoconf still does not properly see the robot and its drives: It's patch time yet again.

Upgrading straight to Maintenance pack 5 yields success. The robot and its drives are auto discovered and the focus can finally shift to getting the volume database and image catalog moved over.

The volume database comes first. After shutting down NetBackup's services a copy of the volDB volume database is copied from the Solaris machine to the Windows 2003 server. Bringing NetBackup back up works like a charm: all 120+ tapes show up complete with volume pool and group references. Dare we try the catalog next? After all, this was area where the doom sayers said most troubles would arise!

This time plain old-fashioned tar is used to gather up the 5000+ files of catalog data. Lo and behold simply laying them down into the images directory on the Windows server is all it takes to make them available to the new NetBackup server. The new master server now needs to be taught that all these images should be restored using itself as the media server. This is done through the GUI's Master Server configuration interface where you can control which media server to use. (This is the equivalent to the Unix server's FORCE_MEDIA_SERVER entry in bp.conf.)

Ah, all's well that ends well. Hopefully this success story will encourage others to migrate and upgrade as well. If you have questions, feel free to contact the author.