Once upon a time, an architect friend of mine commented what is so special IT project management. You have the lead time and alloted time for the task. Plan and execute. Unlike construction project management, we don't have to contend with weather and all the nice things of working outdoors. I tend to agree until I tried installing Symantec Backup Exec 11d
This is the latest version of Backup Exec. When I tried to select several of the customer's servers for a full backup, it gave me an error "Unable to create selection list". A quick check with the website, a support document reveals that if the selection list goes beyond 200k, this error will occur. It goes on how to bypass this. This is a new security feature.
I am also for security and hopefully a more stable product. So I tried the bypass method which involves registry editing. Now to try again with the same result. Hmm lets try a reboot and things are still the same. In the end, after 3 hours I gave up and created two jobs to do the work.
So this is why IT project management is different. Software products that are going to be installed does not always works the way it should. You end up wasting precious time from the maintenance window.
I have not even got started on why I can' backup two servers because the installed agent reads the system state and the shadow copy service properly.