The NetWorker team have decided that a good way to show people what NetWorker (NW) looks like today is to make Fast Start available as a 1.0 Virtual Storage Appliance.
It's time limited to 30 days + 15 days of grace but that should be more than enough to get a feel for the system.
"So where do I get this modern wonder?" I hear you ask. This is where we have diverging paths.
If you have never used an Enterprise Backup product before I strongly advise that you click here. Then click the Evaluation Software tab, select what you want and you'll be taken care of by someone who'll get you moving.
If you're thinking to yourself "Hey Zilla, c'mon now it's me." then you can go right to the source and click here for the OVF files or here for the VMX files depending on if you are using Virtual Infrastructure Client or using Workstation/Server/Player.
Points of Interest.
A couple of notes for those going straight to the source. Inside those zip files are server and client images, both built on SLES 10 and running NetWorker 7.4 SP3.
The initial setup is all Q&A driven but if you're using DHCP addresses you're going to have to resort to the Sys Admin tool of champions, vi, to edit the /etc/hosts file and perhaps resolv.conf. (Though I knew I could skate away without it)
NW requires forward and reverse DNS to be configured correctly so if you're not running DNS you'll want to ssh into the systems login user=root password=welcome and make the appropriate edits.
Once that prep work is done you're ready to launch the GUI by pointing your web browser at the DNS name or the IP address with port 9000 and click on the start button to launch the java based NetWorker Management Console. (NMC) Login with user=administrator password=administrator
This will start you in the Events window. You'll want to click the Enterprise button next to it. Select your server name from the left hand pane then right click on the system in the managed application pane selecting Launch Application. NMC can be used to configure and monitor countless NW servers so we've just selected the one we want.
When you launch the app it opens another window and you're now working with the server running in the VM. If you've configured your client and server correctly right clicking on FS_LINUX and selecting Start will begin the backup. Clicking on the Configuration button will allow you to fine tune the client configuration.
For recovery you have two options. From the client you can either choose to use the CLI based recover utility and select files and directories from that or if you have X-Windows running and you have tunneling enabled with ssh just start nwrecover and use the Motif GUI.
I did all this through VMware player and it works fine, what doesn't appear to work so fine in the version of player as of writing is X-Windows running in the VMware Player window. I'm thinking a VMware tools install would handle this.
If you're using a Mac with VMware Fusion you probably have everything you need already installed. If not you can install all the Unix utilities from your MacOS X installation discs.
I did all this on Vista and having PuTTY and Xming makes life much easier.
Caveats.
-Thou shalt not use this for production backups.
-Though shalt not assume any warranty has been granted or implied.
-Thou shalt remember that you have accepted the license agreements. Like you could forget but don't think we don't know that trick about the EULA accepting Cat. Cat's can't drive backup servers. FACT.
-Thou shalt be clever and get this running with the Celerra Simulator as a Backup to NAS (B2NAS) target for a NetWorker Advanced File Type Device.
-And thou shalt always, always, remember that I'm not Chad and probably won't answer your questions on this. You never got those direct links from me and saying otherwise is just crazy talk.
Enjoy! :-)
