Veritas Netbackup

Symantec's Veritas NetBackup is a backup and recovery tool that can be integrated into RMAN (Oracle's libobk library) to backup the Oracle database. NetBackup support both off-line and online database backups.

Oracle agents

Netbackup has two agents that can backup Oracle databases, they are:

• Netbackup for Oracle; and
• Netbackup for Oracle Advanced BLI (Block level Incremental)

The first is part of standard NetBackup while the BLI agent is part of the (extra cost) NetBackup Snapshot Client option. The BLI agent reduces the amount of data that needs to be backed-up by only backing-up changed data blocks. The result is reduced CPU utilization and network use. These changed data blocks are tracked by the VERITAS Database Edition for Oracle storage checkpoint.

RMAN Integration

When allocating channels, specify the SBT library. Example:

allocate channel t1 type 'SBT_TAPE' parms 'ENV=(NB_ORA_CLIENT=my_host_name),SBT_LIBRARY=/usr/openv/netbackup/bin/libobk.so64.1';
allocate channel t2 type 'SBT_TAPE' parms 'ENV=(NB_ORA_CLIENT=my_host_name),SBT_LIBRARY=/usr/openv/netbackup/bin/libobk.so64.1';

Changing parameters

NetBackup would normally allow you to override parameters from the "allocate" command (see above) or by using RMAN's "send" comamnd. Example:

RMAN> send 'NB_ORA_CLIENT=name'

Checking NetBackup log files

To check the NetBackup log files, see tape mounts, etc:

$ cd /usr/openv/netbackup/logs/user_ops/dbext/logs
$ ls -ltr
$ tail ...
Restore started Fri Dec  7 09:28:52 2007
09:28:53 (147752.xxx) Restore job id 147752 will require 1 image.
09:28:53 (147752.xxx) Media id VI0011 is needed for the restore.
09:29:34 (147752.001) Restoring from image created Tue Oct 30 06:11:24 2007
09:29:36 (147752.001) INF - Waiting for positioning of media id VI0011 on server

External links

• Veritas Netbackup home page
• Netbackup Wikipedia entry
• NetBackup for Oracle Administrator's Guide
• Unofficial NetBackup Howto Site with dozens of Howto's