Help, I'm going for a Netbackup 7 interview!! 1

[valeriegumede]

Hi guys, I've been working on Netbackup for the past 6 months. I have been to training but I need to find a job that will expose me more to the environment. I am terrified because I don't have a lot of exposure on the product. Can I hav possible questions I might be asked on the day.

 

[Skywalker1957]

-Are you familiar with Solaris and Linux?
-How many master servers and clients have you supported in the past?
-Are you familiar with NDMP backups?
-What are and how important are catalog backups?
-Have you ever done capacity planning?
-Have you ever participated in a disaster recovery situation and done a full rebuild and restore of a server before?
-Can you script and what language(s)?
-How many Netbackup environments have you built before?
-Are you familiar with physical robotic tape libraries, virtual tape libraries, Puredisk, and disk-cache backups?
-Have you ever configured Exchange, Oracle RMAN, Sybase, and MS-SQL agent backups?
-Describe/discuss how you would troubleshoot and remediate a backup failure.
-How many ways are there to detect and report on backup failures?
-Describe how to setup backup schedules and data retentions to maximize disk and tape space and usage.
-Have you ever managed offsite tape schedules and transfers?
-Have you ever been involved in a SOX audit?
-Have you ever written backup documentation on policies, and procedures?

 

[bolobaboo]

Hi
skywalker1957
I am new to netbackup too. Would you explain your following process ?
"Have you ever managed offsite tape schedules and transfers?"

Thank you

 

[Skywalker1957]

When you write data to a physical tape media, those backup images on each tape have expiration dates. Some are of infinite retention and will remain offsite FOREVER unless you have a need for a restore or disaster recovery. Other data will expire with time. You want to setup your tape pools so that infinite data goes to one set of media and data that expires goes to another. I also only offsite my full tapes so that I've packed as much data onto a single tape as I possibly can. This is how you control costs. LTO tapes are expensive, so you want to be able to recall as many tapes as you can to re-use them as scratch tapes. Otherwise you will spend a ton of cash on tapes and offsite storage costs.

 

[it4bizz]

hi i m also new to this NB world. i had a question in my inteview 'how would you deal with the disaster recovery' can also someone answer this one regarding disaster recovery and how the people who been working in this environment deal with disaster recovery also can someone also tell me Vaulting and its benefits thanks in advance

 

[Skywalker1957]

That's a really open ended question. There's a huge range of things you would need to be prepared to do in a DR situation from simple database archive restore to a full blown bare metal restore. I'd counter ask them to give you a specific example or scenario. I suppose if the interviewer was not a technical person, you could answer in the most generic of terms something like this:

Suppose a Windows 2003 server crashed. Repair any damaged hardware with same parts/type of platform and successfully complete a POST test and reinstall the OS and re-install Netbackup client software of the same version it had previously. After that's done, select everything in your backup images from the last good incrementals through to the last full backup and restore all the local drives and system state. After the server reboots it should come back just like it was at the time of the last good backup point in time.

Do you have any specific circumstances or scenario they were asking you?

 

[it4bizz]

thanks its a nice little scenario to explain the Disaster Recovery