Amanda Enterprise Edition 3.1.2 Release Notes

Amanda Enterprise 3.1.2 provides new functionality and fixes the issues reported by Amanda Enterprise customers (see the list below).

Compatibility with previous versions of Amanda Enterprise

  • Amanda Enterprise 3.1.2 Rapid Installer detects the existing installation of Amanda Enterprise 3.0.x and 3.1.  Users can upgrade only from Amanda Enterprise 3.0.2 or 3.1.1
  • The upgrade to 3.1.x does not migrate the existing backup set configurations to 3.1. They have to be migrated using the migration tool that is available for download from Zmanda Network.
  • If the files /etc/zmanda/zmc_aee/zmc_user_dumptypes or /etc/zmanda/zmc_aee/zmc_dumptypes were modified in Amanda Enterprise 3.0.x, they will have to manually merged. An error message will be displayed when you login to ZMC first time if these files have been modified. Please contact Zmanda Support Team for assistance.
  • Upgrade Amanda clients to 3.1 before upgrading the Amanda Enterprise server to 3.1
  • When upgrading from 3.0.x version of Windows Client to 3.1 version, it is recommended to preserve data (answer "YES") during upgrade. If preservation of data is not required, recommendation is to un-install 3.0.x using Add/Remove programs and then install Zmanda Windows Client 3.1.
  • During Windows Client upgrade to 3.1, the amandabackup user is deleted and re-created.
  • Zmanda Windows Client 3.1 no longer uses Zmanda key container for storing backup encryption certificates. To recover encrypted backup archives created using Zmanda Windows Client 3.0.x to another machine, it is still necessary to import Zmanda key container and required encryption certificates on the target machine for restoration.

Compatibility with Zmanda Recovery Manager for MySQL

The Amanda backup server may reside on the same machine as ZRM server. The order of installation of ZRM 3.1 and Amanda Enterprise 3.1.2 matters. This procedure is described here.

New Features in 3.1.x

  • Amanda Enterprise server and client support for Ubuntu 9.10, Ubuntu 9.04, Debian 5.0, Fedora 11 and Fedora 12 has been added.
  • Support for Fedora core 4 and Fedora 5 has been dropped.
  • Support for backup and recovery using NDMPv4 protocol.
  • Support for backup and recovery of VMWare ESX servers.
  • Support for MS Exchange 2010 and SharePoint Server 2010.
  • Support for differential backups of MS SQL server using VSS.
  • Support for differential backups of MS Exchange using VSS.
  • Support for restoration of storage groups/database to Exchange recovery storage group and recovery databases.
  • Zmanda Management Console has significant changes to improve usability. More functionality has been added in Backup and Admin pages.
  • New quick restoration capability - ZMC Express Restore.

Customer-reported bugs fixed in Amanda Enterprise Release 3.1.x

  • All 3.0.x updates/patches are included in Amanda Enterprise 3.1
  • Some of other important bugs that were fixed are:
    • Success or Failure message in the backup notification email subject line.
    • Reduced the number of package dependencies for Solaris installations.
    • Support for International character sets
    • ZMC Monitor page does not refresh automatically.
    • Restoration files/directories containing [ and other characters.
    • Ability to skip backups of certain DLEs in the ZMC Backup What page.
    • ZMC handles exclude lists well
    • ZMC checks the validity of backup set names and reports errors.
    • Success or Failure message in the backup notification email subject line.
    • VMWare application fails if the datastore is not named datastore<num>.
    • Handling incremental backups when the changes in PostgreSQL is less than 16MB.
    • In ZMC Backup Staging, specifying Staging Size as "no more than" %age of the partition size does not work correctly. Use other options for specifying staging size.
    • Backup of extended attributes for Linux and Solaris file systems requires users to select Extended Attributes and set Override to Schily star and SUN tar respectively in ZMC Backup What page (click Advanced Options).

Known Issues and Workarounds

  • ZMC will not be able to restore successfully if the tape required for restoration is not available in the tape changer slots reserved for the backup set.  Workaround is to make all tapes required for restoration available in the tape changer. The list of tapes required for restoration is displayed in the ZMC Restore Restore page.
  • A ZMC user with Monitor only role will not be able to select a backup set. This issue will be fixed in a patch release.
  • ZMC Restore Restore page will refresh the page automatically even after completion of the restoration process. The page refresh should be ignored.
  • Restarting ZMC services before logging into ZMC will print lots of warning messages. These messages can be ignored. Logging into ZMC will complete the backup set configuration migration if needed. Messages will not appear after first login to ZMC.
  • Seting Staging Area size in ZMC Backup Staging Area page as a %age of disk space will cause the value to be incorrectly set. Avoid specifying Staging area size as %age of disk space.
  • Non-ASCII characters are not supported in the ZMC Backup Object names for backup. Non-ASCII characters can be present in the file/directory inside the backup object.

Documentation

For a full list of supported platforms please review the compatibility guide here.

Amanda Enterprise 3.1 documentation provides detailed information on how to install and configure Amanda server and client on these platforms.