TSM expires files if GPFS filesystem unavailable (unmounted)

[afrankel]

We have TSM backing up GPFS filesystems. If the GPFS filesystem becomes unavailable (ie: umount or GPFS shutdown) while a scheduled backup is running, TSM expires the files from the backup.

Is there something we can do about it? Can we tell TSM to verify that the underlying GPFS filesystem is available before expiring files?

Thanks,

Andras

[chad_small]

You might want to convert the scheduled backup to a scheduled command script to allow for some FS availability checking before it executes the backup of a particular GPFS.

[afrankel]

Thanks. Could you give me the link where I can read up on scheduled backup versus scheduled command script?

Andras

[RaCol]

Hi Afrankel,

you could use the preschedulecmd-option in the dsm.sys or dsm.opt-file to check if the gpfs-filesystem is available. If not the script should end with an return-code unequal zero. So further processing of the schedule will be stopped and the TSM client will not be aware about the missing filesystem.

[afrankel]

About preschedulecmd, is it executed (1) before the the whole backup starts, or is it executed (2) every time before a file needs to be backed up? The later (2) behaviour would work for me, because I am worried about loosing the filesystem while the backup is running.

Thanks,

Andras

[RaCol]

The preschedulecmd will be executed before the whole backup starts (behaviour (1)). I don´t know exactly what happens if the gpfs-filesystem goes down during backup. Normally I would expect that the TSM client throws an error that it can´t acccess the filesystem anymore. I guess that in this case the not backed upped files won´t get in the inactive state. But I´m not sure about this, so you have to test this case or maybe another person knows more about this case. Another possibility would be that you implement a kind of script control for the gpfs-umount or shutdown, which checks first if a backup is running...

Regards,

Ralf