Netbackup 6.5.4 and Oracle 11gR2

I’ve been involved in testing for upgrading a database to 11gR2 for a while, and I was quite intrigued to see this posting from Mark Bobak. This site uses Netbackup 6.5.4 and the Netbackup database agent to do the backups so this becomes a bit of a showstopper if I can’t backup the database. When you try and run a Netbackup backup against an 11gR2 instance you find the following happens:

Exception [type: SIGSEGV, Address not mapped to object] [ADDR:0x14] [PC:0x3BA6B70D00, strcpy()+16] [flags: 0x0, count: 1]
Errors in file /opt/oracle/diag/rdbms/test11g/TEST11g/trace/TEST11g_ora_2778.trc (incident=29067):
ORA-07445: exception encountered: core dump [strcpy()+16] [SIGSEGV] [ADDR:0x14] [PC:0x3BA6B70D00] [Address not mapped to object] []
Incident details in: /opt/oracle/diag/rdbms/test11g/TEST11g/incident/incdir_29067/TEST11g_ora_2778_i29067.trc

Searching in Metalink for this ORA-07445 error produces document 959015.1. This basically says that yep, the latest version of Netbackup is not compatible with 11gR2.

So do these guys get on the Beta programme and test their software?

Symantec have stated it will be might be fixed in 6.5.5 and this will have “first availability” from first week of November. However General Availability won’t be until second week of December.

Symantec stated it will be fixed from the next major Netbackup release which is scheduled for first week of February.
update
6.5.5 Did not contain any new Oracle agent, the agent to be used with 6.5.5 release was still the 6.5.4 agent. I’ve managed to get aboard the Symantec “First Availability” programme and hope to obtain 7.0 on 11th January 2010. Will update on whether 7.0 fixes the issue.

10 thoughts on “Netbackup 6.5.4 and Oracle 11gR2”

  1. We tried 11gR2 – and found similiar gotchas right out of the gate. Made us wonder how Exadata V2 could be released with 11gR2. There must be a bundle of patches to go along with the otn software.

    Reply

  2. Hi Daryl,

    Did you run in to any other issues, I’d be really interested in hearing if you did. We have done a bit of testing and it seems ok. I’d be interested in hearing anyone else’s experience with 11gR2

    jason.

    Reply

  3. Hi Jarneil,

    We are planning to upgrade Linux OS on our 10G clusters with SAN from RHEL 4.7 to 5.3.

    Do you have any recommendation for upgrading the OS without reformatting SAN.

    Thanks,
    Sean

    Reply

  4. Jason,

    Thanks for this heads-up. I’m also working on an 10gR2->11gR2 upgrade, and the client is using Netbackup. We’re still in the early phases of testing, so I’ll pass this up the chain and see what this does to comfort levels. 🙂

    As an aside, it appears that the My Oracle Support upgrade has invalidated some of the traditional ways of linking to old Metalink content; I got a 404 when trying to click through to the Note ID you provided. The following link works, however, as long as you’re signed in to My Oracle Support already: https://support.oracle.com/CSP/main/article?cmd=show&type=NOT&id=959015.1

    Regards,

    John P.

    Reply

  5. Hi John,

    Thanks for reading! Glad to share and save anyway a bit of a nasty surprise, forewarned is forearmed, perhaps.

    jason.

    Reply

    • It is very straightforward if you follow the upgrade instructions. You need to rollback some packages as they are bundled in now.

      Reply

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