Networker VBA appliance DDBoost Failover.

We've recently found that our DD640 appliance (OS 5.4.6.0-503967) were setup without any failover or aggregation on it's 2 network ports - essentially 1 port was doing all the work and the other sat there totally dormant,

I've setup an ifgroup, which has now given us the benefit of increased bandwidth but resilience is still an issue.

After reading a lot of documents and forum threads I've found that ddboost plugin 3.0+ can use ' -failover' as an alternative hostname, that will give us the resilience we require, with the minimum of effort.

I've tested this with some backups, and when the primary address is unavailable (port disabled) networker 8.2 clients will carry on backing up direct to DD, whereas 8.1 and previous clients fall back to backing up via the storage node.

I've further tested with VBA jobs (V1.1.2.8 appliances) and this method of failover doesn't work - the backups will just fail.

According to the listing from 'ddboost show connection' on the DD appliance, the VBA is listed with plugin version 3.0.0.3-446710 - so in theory it should work.

Has anyone configure this method of failover on a VBA, or knows how to get this working?

(If this is more a Networker question I'm happy to repost there - it's hard to know whether it's specifically DDBoost related or Networker...)

References

https://community.emc.com/thread/203134?tstart=0 Excellent forum thread regarding the networker config

and https://russia.emc.com/collateral/TechnicalDocument/docu57271.pdf pg20 describes the alternative hostname method )