Migrate a NetWorker Server to a new NVE

IMHO - if you know NW (what you obviously do) then it makes more sense to just install a new 'standard' NW server and migrate using the DR (nsrdr) method.

NVE is easy the handle for customers who do not know NW and/or the OS but it is much more inflexible as it uses predefined packages. Consequently - even for a tiny but important change - such package must be prepared. If this - for whatever reason - will not work to 100% you will be pretty lost. And of course this applies to both - NW and Linux updates.

Just prevent potential trouble ...

Thanks for your opinion ... It matches mine

I think I will test it in my test-environment first.

Yep ... doin' networker for more than 10 years ... but a migration from a "normal" NW server to a NVE ... that is a new topic ... so let's go testing

One of our internal teams already performed migrations from rhel to nve. We intend to do the same. I will gave a look at their steps and might be able to share their experiences (done with nve 19.3).

For some parts it might be less flexible (for example if you (mis)use the nw server for other functions for which you might not have the required packages), however we expect to gain mote flexibility as we as backup team can more flexible adapt for example sudo rules as it suits fit instead of having to jump through dozens of hoops. So we will plan patching to our own time frame based on dell patch releases. Also a dedicated appliance might have even less vulnerabilities due to having less packages.

Up until now regular deployment of a nve hasn't shown any issues yet that we weren't able to address, solve or work with. Meaning trying to setup things more or less how we dealt with rhel, except for the fact that we have the ova being deployed as-is, including the somewhat peculiar filesystem layouts with sometimes multiple links towards another filesystem. But that is what you get when using the setup for avamar as basis for nw nve...

For one I hope it will support going to higher major versions of suse, unlike our internal linux teams who hesitate to do so, even though it is supported.i don't like the idea of having to migration from rhel6 to 7 and later again to 8, simply due to an os team not wanting to do just that. I hope testing and validation for dell's use of Suse will keep that possible.

Only thing to look out for is also an ova nw storage node version, then we could turn the whole infra into backup appliances.

I for one am looking forward (*) to using nve as a replacement for normal rhel based vm's.

(*) having been a unix sysadmin for years in the past however helps feeling at ease with that. That job shouldn't be taken too lightly.