All,

I have often heard people say, as Linday just did, "keep at least one
drive free for user restores".  Is there in fact any way to cause TSM to
leave one tape drive always free, so no other tape process besides a
restore can access it?

In our environment, we have 10 TSM servers sharing a tape library with
24 LTO4 tape drives.  Each day they all have to accomplish the entire
daily cycle of backup stgpools, db backups, migrations, reclamations,
etc. and these are driven by perl scripts on each of the 10 instances.
I cannot think of any reasonable way for all of these to get their jobs
done as quickly as possible, but somehow remain sensitive to what all
the other instances need to do so that they won't use all the tape
drives available.  We use most of the 24 tape drives most of the time as
it is.

I can think of some extremely inefficient ways, like making all the
backup storage pools wait until all of them are finished, then everybody
goes on to the next step, etc.  But this will inevitably cause long
delays where half the tape drives are sitting idle waiting for one or
two slow instances to finish before going on to the next step.  We can't
afford that sort of waste in the schedule.

Is there some feature to do this that I missed?  

Best Regards,

John D. Schneider 
Phone: 314-364-3150 
Cell: 314-750-8721
Email:  John.Schneider AT Mercy DOT net 


-----Original Message-----
From: ADSM: Dist Stor Manager [mailto:ADSM-L AT VM.MARIST DOT EDU] On Behalf Of
lindsay morris
Sent: Tuesday, November 04, 2008 11:57 AM
To: ADSM-L AT VM.MARIST DOT EDU
Subject: Re: [ADSM-L] Offsite reclamation problem

Lots of people have a best-practice of always keeping at least one
drive free for user restores.
That minimizes the problem.

It makes users happy too, because
even though a restore does pre-empt another task, it may take TSM 40
minutes to finish the reclamation it was working on and give up the
drive.

So the user has to sit waiting for far too long (in some cases).


------
Lindsay Morris
Principal
www.tsmworks.com
919-403-8260
lindsay AT tsmworks DOT com



On Nov 4, 2008, at Nov 4, 12:21 PM, Bos, Karel wrote:

> No :)
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: ADSM: Dist Stor Manager [mailto:ADSM-L AT VM.MARIST DOT EDU] On
> Behalf Of
> Thomas Denier
> Sent: dinsdag 4 november 2008 18:14
> To: ADSM-L AT VM.MARIST DOT EDU
> Subject: Offsite reclamation problem
>
> We have a 5.4.2.0 TSM server running under mainframe Linux. We have
> five
> tape drives available for our primary tape storage pool and five tape
> drives available for our copy storage pool. We run offsite tape
> reclaimation with 'maxproc=5'. If a client runs a restore while off
> reclamation is going on, TSM will take a tape drive away from
> reclamation. This is done by cancelling a reclamation process, rather
> than having a process go into mount point wait. TSM does not start a
> replacement process when this happens. A restore that runs for a
> couple
> of minutes can leave a pair of tape drives sitting idle for hours. Is
> there any configuration setting or release level upgrade that will
> cause
> TSM to handle this situation more intelligently?
>
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