During the NetBackup 7.5 Upgrade, part of the catalog is moved from the flat files into the EMM database. This may give you cause for concern as this seems like it may take a long time to complete. In my experience, it has not taken very long and conforms to the specs that Symantec has outlined in the Upgrade Guide. I have done a few upgrades and wanted to share some real world experience. Your results may vary, but at least you have something to draw on from my experiences:

Original Version Upgraded Version Master Make/Model # Images Converted Images per Second Time Elapsed HH:MM:SS
7.1.0.4 7.5.0.4 Oracle T2000 22,673 21 00:22:51
7.1.0.4 7.5.0.4 Oracle T5220 69,399 37 00:36:01
7.1.0.4 7.5.0.4 Oracle T2000 64,931 14 01:23:38*
7.1.0.4 7.5.0.4 NBU 5220 Appliance 256 128 00:00:16
7.1.0.4 7.5.0.4 NBU 5220 Appliance 4,559 55 00:49:40
7.1.0.4 7.5.0.4 NBU 5220 Appliance 176 1 00:04:54

* We found that this server’s catalog disk was on 7200rpm SATA which contributed to the poor performance.

Note1 – The time shown is the total time it took for the Image Cleanup job to run and complete. Obviously, the catalog migration portion is faster, and in some it is significantly faster. The remaining time is the image deletion on the media servers. I wanted to show the entire time it took so that you can have a feel for how long this may take. You can take steps in shortening the Image Cleanup run time by running it manually before the upgrade.

Note 2 – This only concerns the actual image migration after the server was upgraded to 7.5 and had the latest patch applied. The actual time to install the base upgrade and patch is not accounted for here.