Using Best Practices to Install and Upgrade Arcserve Backup › Best Practices for Upgrading Arcserve Backup from a Previous Release › Upgrading Multiple Stand-alone Servers Sharing a Remote Database › Recommended Configuration - Arcserve Backup Domain with a Primary Server and Member Servers

Recommended Configuration - Arcserve Backup Domain with a Primary Server and Member Servers

If your current configuration consists of multiple Arcserve Backup servers in a domain, the best practice is to upgrade to a centralized management environment that consists of a primary server and one or more member servers. A centralized management environment lets you share a local or remote database in a Arcserve Backup domain.

To upgrade to a centralized management environment, you must upgrade one of your existing Arcserve servers to a Arcserve Backup Primary Server and then upgrade all other servers in the domain to Arcserve Backup Member Servers.

Note: The system from your previous installation that is hosting the Arcserve database must assume the role of the Arcserve Backup Primary Server.

Note: Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Express Edition does not support remote communication. When you install Arcserve Backup using Microsoft SQL Server 2008 Express Edition, the installation wizard installs the database application and the Arcserve database instance on the primary server. To host the Arcserve database instance on a remote system, you must use Microsoft SQL Server.

The following diagram illustrates the architecture of a centralized management environment:

Note: To enable Arcserve Backup to communicate with a remote database, you must use Microsoft SQL Server to host the Arcserve Backup database instance.