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Hi Team,

 

We are looking at moving our Commserve up from SP24, to SP26 or above, as there are one or two fixes that are in the later SP’s that would help us.

 

However, we have some very old hardware which runs  Windows Server 2008 which our customer has not been able to replace. They are also Media Agents.

 

Roughly eighteen months ago, we successfully moved the 2K8 Media Agents to SP16, whilst at the same time upgraded the remaining Commserve and Media agents to SP24.

Everything has been fine - no issues whatsoever with the older MA’s continuing to run on SP16 and their 2K8 OS.  We are probably fortunate that their is limited usage. Filesystem, VSA and a small amount of SQL.

 

The question I have now, is does anyone have SP26 or later in their environment, as well as older media agent SP’s?   And if you do, have you had any issues?

I understand that Commvault stopped supporting 2K8 beyond SP12 for new deployments, and generally speaking prefer all CS and MS SP’s at the same level. But our hands are tied as the customer cannot yet provide new hardware to replace the older MA’s.

 

Thanks in advance.  And just to confirm, we definitely are not going beyond SP16 for the os 2K8 ma’s.

 

 

 

I have no experience with that and would be surprised if someone else would manage an environment with such a wide version spread, but it is supported. The reasoning behind it is a bit odd in my opinion as the customer is unable to deliver new hardware. Can't they afford it to buy new hardware? Did you consider bringing up the option to go for second-hand hardware and why not run the MA virtually as it is currently running VSA as well? 

Not sure what your role is there but one think which is also part of data management is keeping your data safe and still running Windows 2008 means the customer is at risk. So in case you are responsible for backup and restore than I would definitely consider sending them a risk letter stating that you cannot be held responsible for them not being able to buy a new server to replace the MA. 

I have no experience with that and would be surprised if someone else would manage an environment with such a wide version spread, but it is supported.

 

Hi Onno,

 

Welcome to the world of Managed Services where it extremely variable as to which kit and configurations you get to manage.

I can guarantee that there will be older and more varied configurations than this. There will be V10 ma’s out there, and Windows 2003 will still be floating around in some configurations.

 

Thankfully we don’t have those issues to deal with.

 

 

I have been in that business as well in the past, but times have changed. Companies running unsupported operating systems and ancient software versions are easy preys for ransomware attacks and hack attempts and are part of the reason why ransomware attacks are so successful.

In the past IT was supporting to the business, but these days your company will not survive anymore when you can't access your data anymore for a period of time. As a managed service provider I think you should be very careful helping out customers who run their business like this and really try to convince them that holding off investments in IT can seriously jeopardize their business. I would for sure have them sign risk letters that your company cannot be held responsible for damage and take recovery out of the covered service. 

Technically keeping the old MA’s on SP16 would be fine on newer CS. As long as these older MA’s do not have shared storage pools, indexes or DDB partitions with the newer MA’s. If they’re independent MA’s and purely just need to talk to CS, then everything should still work just like it is working now on SP24. 

 

 

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