Migrate NetWorker from Solaris SPARC to Linux x86

Hi Tom,

There is no official public documentation for cross-platform migrations,  this task is done only by either EMC professional services or one of EMC partners. It is not supported to do it by yourself, EMC professional services must be involved.

Thanks,

Ahmed Bahaa

Hi TomR,

Although i haven't tried it myself, i don't see how the process would be any different, as the only files you would be backing up and restoring are the mmdb and the CFI. No binaries would be migrated, therefore, i don't see it being a problem.

Best to give it a shot and see. Let us know how you go.

Hi Babak,

This process is only supported if done by EMC professional services or EMC partner.

I think the problem in that is in the cross-platform migration, some database conversion has to occur as it depends on operating system. This is done by EMC by their tools for cross-platform migrations for exporting database on old server and importing it on new one with the conversion. For that is it is only supported to be done by EMC professional services to ensure that the databases conversion has been done successfully from the old OS to the new one.

Thanks,

Ahmed Bahaa

The reason this is not supported is that SPARC processors are big endian and x86 processors are little endian which means that data is stored in the bytes differently.  It is possible to move data from one architecture to the other but is only supported if EMC do this.

I have an old version of the procedure which uses the nsrmmdbasm to read the media database into a file, you then do a binary ftp to your new platform and use nsrmmdbasm -r to read the data back into the media database; however it is not quite so simple as that as the last command also uses an undocumented flag -2 which my procedure says relates to the database version - since my procedure is from 2005 and states this covers Networker 6.0 to 7.0 I would be reasonably certain this has since been superseded...

Adding some notes to the thread.

There is an internal EMC document that describes the process of migrating the NetWorker media database to a different operating system platform.  As Babak mentioned above, ASCII or text files transfer well between operating systems, but binary files don't do so well, because of big-endian and little-endian issue mentioned by David.  The NetWorker indexes are text (since version 7.5), but the media database is compiled MD5, and won't make the trip without a bit conversion.

The free supported technique is to install the new NetWorker server on the new platform, copy over the indexes, use SCANNER to re-scan every tape to rebuild the media database.  (Not the complete steps, just a mention, see ESG67427).

The migration process itself has be done by EMC to be supported, but all indications are it is possible.  In my case, there are literally 1000's of tapes that would have to be scanned in to rebuild the media database using scanner.  Any possiblity of converting the database has to be investigated and performed if possible, and at whatever cost for consulting.

According to EMC, the following scenarios do NOT require a migration.  You can go straight to an upgrade in these cases:

As of April 27th 2010, scenarios that do not require a cross-platform migration process include:

• Change from Windows 32-bit (x86) to Windows 64-bit (x86-64).
• Change from HP PA-RISC architecture to HP IA64 on HP-UX.
• Change from Linux 32-bit to Linux 64-bit. 
• Change from Sun Sparc/UltraSparc to Sun UltraSparc T1/T2.