Question from a reader about licenses

Today I tried Data Protector 9. In the Installation guide I read that earlier licenses cannot be used in version 9.0. Is it right? Even 8.1 licenses cannot be used? Why does HP changes license types so often making previous version unusable?

The install guide is correct.

A long time ago (in version 6 and earlier) you bought a license and that license would continue to work in later versions of Data Protector. Starting around version 7, HP changed their policy on this and each version of Data Protector now recognises licenses only for that version.

If you have a support contract, this is no big deal. You just go to webware.hp.com and rehost your existing licenses (any version) to version 9. If you are upgrading (say) from version 6.21 to version 9 by migrating to a new box, you can rehost to the new server and keep the old version running in parallel until the migration is done.

If for some reason your entitlement doesn't appear there when it should then it could mean one of two things:

• Your entitlement is assigned to someone else's account at your organisation. The licensing team at HP can do a search and re-assign it. I don't know about the other regions but the APAC licensing team are some of the most efficient people I've worked with at HP or anywhere else. Jianping is particularly amazing -- I've sent her emails, and within an hour had a customer's issue resolved -- and then she apologised for it taking so long!
• Your support contract has lapsed. This happens a lot where a customer bought Data Protector and then later on added some additional licenses; you will often end up with two different support contracts with different renewal dates. You might have renewed one, but not the other. If it's only happened recently, HP offer support contract catch-ups where you pay for the time that you weren't under support, plus a little bit more. Sometimes this is cheaper than buying new licenses outright.

Of course, if you don't have a support contract, then you don't get free upgrades. What you get is a perpetual license for the version that you bought.

I've found that a lot of customers have troubles keeping track of what is and isn't licensed, and tracking down licenses can be a bit of a challenge. Feel free to contact me (gregb@ifost.org.au) if you need any help with anything.

Greg Baker is an independent consultant who happens to do a lot of work on HP DataProtector. He is the author of the only published books on HP Data Protector (http://www.ifost.org.au/books/#dp). He works with HP and HP partner companies to solve the hardest big-data problems (especially around backup). See more at IFOST's DataProtector pages at http://www.ifost.org.au/dataprotector

Installing Data Protector client on MacOS 10.10

Data Protector 9.04 and earlier didn't recognise that they could install correctly on MacOX 10.10 (Yosemite) systems.

Here's my dirty trick around this.

Copy the contents of the HP-UX 9.0 DVD to the OS X box. There's a file called omnisetup.sh in the LOCAL_INSTALL directory.

Around line 265 you will see the following:

    *x86_64*)

        case "${OS_REV}" in

          10.*) SERIES="apple/i386/macos-10.4"

        ;;   

       esac 

      ;;   

That 10.* line is matching the operating system version. Edit it to add whatever version uname -a outputs. For 10.10 uname -a says the following :

Darwin osxbox.ifost.org.au 14.3.0 Darwin Kernel Version 14.3.0

So we need to match 14.3.0. 

Here's what I did:

    *x86_64*)

        case "${OS_REV}" in

          10.*) SERIES="apple/i386/macos-10.4" ;;

          14.*) SERIES="apple/i386/macos-10.4"

        ;;   

       esac 

      ;;   

Then you can run the installer

sudo ./omnisetup.sh -install da

The output should look like this:

  No Data Protector software detected on the target system.

  Packets going to be (re)installed: omnicf ts_core da

  Installing Core (omnicf)...

Data Protector software package successfully installed

  Installing Core (ts_core)...

Data Protector software package successfully installed

  Installing Disk Agent (da)...

Data Protector software package successfully installed

  Client was not imported into the cell.

  Please, perform the import manually

  Installation/upgrade session finished.


When that's done, you can then import the OSX box using the Data Protector GUI.

Greg Baker is an independent consultant who happens to do a lot of work on HP DataProtector. He is the author of the only published books on HP Data Protector (http://www.ifost.org.au/books/#dp). He works with HP and HP partner companies to solve the hardest big-data problems (especially around backup). See more at IFOST's DataProtector pages at http://www.ifost.org.au/dataprotector

Data Protector 9.04 released with lots of new features and bugfixes

As usual, you need a support contract, and then you install these patches over a vanilla 9.0, 9.01, 9.02 or 9.03. All the links to fetch them are here http://www.ifost.org.au/Documents/dp-patch-list.html

Notable highlights:

• There's a note that says that Automated Replication Synchronization is now supported. I think that probably means that my crazy mcfsend.pl and mcfreceive.pl scripts (to keep to cell managers in sync with each other's backup sessions) is now obsolete. In other words -- if I understand the feature correctly -- you can now have a cell manager sitting at the DR site and keep it in sync with the one in production.
• Apparently you can now have more than 1200 concurrent CRS sessions. I'd like to know what site found that bug.
• You can push out site-specific patches from the cell manager, as well as the normal HP-published ones.
• MySQL support. Now how hard would it be to add Postgresql support?

VMware highlights:

• Support for vSphere 6
• If you have Windows virtual machines with GPT-formatted virtual disks you can now use the VMware GRE (Granular Recovery Extension) with these.
• You can do snapshot backups of 3PAR LUNs; you can snapshot either end of a replicated 3PAR replication link.

Of course I'm available for consulting to implement these patches, or to help you upgrade from an older version so that you can take advantage of these new features.

Greg Baker is an independent consultant who happens to do a lot of work on HP DataProtector. He is the author of the only published books on HP Data Protector (http://www.ifost.org.au/books/#dp). He works with HP and HP partner companies to solve the hardest big-data problems (especially around backup). See more at IFOST's DataProtector pages at http://www.ifost.org.au/dataprotector