Veritas NetBackup™ LiveUpdate Guide

Last Published:
Product(s): NetBackup (8.1.1, 8.1)

About LiveUpdate policies

A LiveUpdate policy lets you control which NetBackup servers and clients are updated. You must manually activate the policy, which lets you control when the updates occur.

When you install NetBackup, the LiveUpdate agent is installed automatically. No additional configuration information is required at the time of installation. You use the LiveUpdate policy to specify which LiveUpdate server the hosts in the policy use.

For example, you installed LiveUpdate on the master server and two other hosts. All three of these servers were configured as LiveUpdate servers. When you create the LiveUpdate policy, you must specify the LiveUpdate Server Location. You specify any of the three LiveUpdate server names as the LiveUpdate Server Location. Then you add all the host names of the hosts you want updated by the LiveUpdate policy. When the policy is run, the specified LiveUpdate Server Location is assigned to all the hosts in the policy.

Alternatively, you can configure the LiveUpdate Server Location at each individual host. You must use this configuration method before you run a LiveUpdate policy on that host.

Use the following guidelines when you create LiveUpdate policies:

Compatibility

  • Veritas recommends that you create separate LiveUpdate policies for NetBackup servers and NetBackup clients.

  • Always run the servers policy before you run the clients policy. Clients cannot run a later version of NetBackup than the servers.

Servers that run LiveUpdate policies

Since NetBackup services and daemons are shut down during release update installation, do not add the following servers to a LiveUpdate policy:

  • The NetBackup master server that runs the LiveUpdate policy

  • Any media server that is involved with running the LiveUpdate policy

These servers must be updated through the command-line interface.

See Updating servers by using NetBackup LiveUpdate.

Clustered systems

All nodes in a cluster must be updated, so make sure to include all actual host names (not virtual names) in a LiveUpdate policy. The best practice is to have a separate policy for each clustered server. Then include all node host names in the policy for that cluster

In addition, the Limit jobs per policy attribute of the LiveUpdate policy should be set to at least the number of nodes in the cluster. This setting helps ensure that all the nodes are updated at the same time, which lowers the chance of failover in between updating the nodes. If a failover occurred before all nodes were updated, the NetBackup database and the binaries on the active node could be mismatched.

LiveUpdate policies are not a type of backup policy but are a type of NetBackup generic policy. From the NetBackup Administration Console, LiveUpdate policies do not appear in the Policies tab. To view and manage LiveUpdate policies, you must select File > LiveUpdate or click the LiveUpdate icon.