NetBackup Appliance Health Maintenance Plugin AddOn Package

Description

The Health Maintenance plugin continuously monitors and checks the upgrade health status to ensure that your appliance is in a good state for an upgrade. The addon package installs the following components:

• Health Maintenance plugin

• AutoUpdate software feature

The plugin pings the analyzer tool to start a health check on the appliance and provides an accurate upgrade readiness status through the installed analyzer tool.

The AutoUpdate feature updates the analyzer tool automatically to ensure that you always have the latest available version installed on the appliance. When you install this version of the plugin, the AutoUpdate feature is disabled by default. If you install the plugin on appliances with software versions 4. 0 - 5.0 that do not currently have an analyzer tool, the latest version of the analyzer tool is downloaded automatically. If you install the plugin on appliances with software versions earlier than 4.0 that do not currently have an analyzer tool, the plugin cannot download the analyzer tool automatically because an API is not available for those versions. You must download the analyzer tool manually.

The Health Maintenance plugin works together with CallHome.  Enabling AutoUpdate lets you keep pre-upgrade checks up to date and receive accurate upgrade readiness status recommendations through System Health Insights on the NetInsights Console. You must enable Call Home to ensure that you see the upgrade readiness data updates through System Health Insights on the NetInsights Console. Veritas recommends that you keep AutoUpdate enabled.

This addon can be used with NetBackup Appliance software versions 3.2 through 5.0, including all maintenance releases for those versions.

You can install this addon package on the following NetBackup Appliance models:

• 5250
• 5240
• 5350
• 5340

New shell menu for command AutoUpdate feature

After installing the addon package and reconnecting the SSH session, the following appliance shell menu command becomes available:

• Manage > Software > UpgradeReadinessCheck

Use the following command options to enable or disable the feature, and to show its current status.

• Manage > Software > UpgradeReadinessCheck > AutoUpdate Enable
• Manage > Software > UpgradeReadinessCheck > AutoUpdate Disable
• Manage > Software > UpgradeReadinessCheck > AutoUpdate Show

Usage recommendations

Always use the latest analyzer tool (NetBackup Appliance Upgrade Readiness Analyzer) to check the appliance upgrade readiness state.

Deployment instructions

Download the package and then upload it to the appliance using one of following methods:

• NetBackup Appliance Web Console

   Download the package from this page through the web browser to a computer, then upload it to the appliance using the NetBackup Appliance Web Console as follows:

1. Open a browser and log in to the appliance web console as an administrator.

2. Click Manage > Software Update, then click on Upload to upload the package to the appliance.

• CIFS or NFS share

  Download the package from this page through the web browser to a computer, then upload it to the appliance using a CIFS or NFS share as follows:

1. Open an SSH session and log in to the appliance shell menu as an administrator.
2. Open an NFS or a CIFS share with the following command:  Manage > Software > Share Open
3. Map or mount the appliance share directory as follows:

• Windows CIFS share:
  \\<appliance-name>\incoming_patches

• UNIX NFS share:    
  mkdir -p /mount/<appliance-name> 
mount <appliance-name>:/inst/patch/incoming/mount/<appliance-name>

4. Copy the plugin addon rpm package to the mounted share.
5. Close the NFS or CIFS share with the following command: Manage > Software > Share Close

Installation

• To verify that the plugin addon package was uploaded successfully on the appliance, use the following command: Manage > Software > List Downloaded  

• To install the plugin addon package, use the following command: Manage > Software > Install

Notes

• The current version of the plugin, 1.0.5, has the AutoUpdate feature disabled by default.  For all previous versions of this plugin, versions 1.0.4 and earlier, the AutoUpdate feature was enabled by default.
• When you upgrade an appliance that already has the Health Maintenance plugin installed, you must reinstall it for all upgrades up to version 5.0 and any associated maintenance

releases. For more details, see the following article: https://www.veritas.com/support/en_US/article.100053940

• When you enable or disable AutoUpdate on one HA node, you must also log in to the other node and configure it the same to ensure a matched configuration on both nodes.

• If you run the Manage > Software > List Downloaded command after downloading the health maintenance plugin addon, the NBU_Version of the output appears incorrectly as 1.0.0. This is a display issue only and does not affect functionality. The issue will be resolved in a release after NetBackup Appliance software version 5.0.