Changing Master Servers

[tech2004]

I am upgrading all my Servers to W2K3 from W2K. My media servers are all up to 2K3 but my Master Server is not. My plan is to make one of my media servers the new master server. Then rebuild my old master server give it the same name and ip address and make it the master server again once it is rebuilt with W2K3. Any expected problems with this? Also to change a media to master, is it just a matter of going into the host properties of the Master and selecting the media server and hit the Make Master button? Does this make the original master a media server and the media the new master server?

 

[Stumpr]

Seems like a lot of work. Why not just keep the master as a master. Simply backup your catalog. Do the upgrade and bprecover the catalog?

Bob Stump
Just because the Veritas documentation states a certain thing does not make it a fact

 

[tech2004]

Thanks for the reply,

I am not just upgrading the Server to W2K3. I am rebuilding it with W2K3 as to get rid of anything left behind from the W2K build. I get what you are saying that it would be easier to just upgrade but we format and rebuild our systems. In this case would my earlier idea on changing the master and media work?

 

[GreyWanderer]

You are forcing youself into a bprecover process as your backout as well. Having just one extra machine to build and recover in nearline mode would be far less of a headache. As for flipping the switch make master, I do not know, I guess that would depend on where your mediadb, pooldb, vmglob, etc lived.

As Bob has stated above as a scenario, I have performed an in place upgrade of W2K SP4 to W2K3 on a test machine, barebones installed the master server, then bprecovered to it from the latest production catalog, brought it online to the production wire without event. Again this required one additional server to do. I like the reliabilty of a solid backout and having my original data and machine in tact.