Re: [ADSM-L] best/most effecient way to backup a CIFS Share

What actual hardware contains the shares?  If by chance it is a real Netapp (or 
IBM N-series), you can use snapdiff, which is the best possible solution.

If it's some other brand of NAS, you are stuck.  And yes, it's dirt slow.  I've 
done this at many customers, and CIFS is just a very slow protocol, dunno why.

One thing that will help, add to the dsm.opt:
resourceutilization 10

That way the client will start 4 pairs of sessions concurrently (each pair is 1 
producer and 1 consumer thread, 4 concurrent pairs is the most you can get).  I 
usually find it works much better running parallel.   (It appears not to be a 
problem of how much data is being sent across the network, but a problem of 
traversing the directory trees via CIFS being very, very slow.)

If there are a zillion directory entries on these shares, and if the client you 
are using is 32 bit or only has 4-8G of RAM, try adding also
MEMORYEFFICIENTBACKUP DISKCACHEMETHOD

That lets the client write the huge active file lists to temp workspace instead 
of keeping it in memory (and you may have to do that anyway when you go to 
resourceutilization 10 or the scheduler is likely to crash on a 34bit machine). 
 You would think it wouldn't help, but sometimes it does.

This suggestion isn't about speed but manageability:
Take a look at setting up these schedulers using a proxy name instead of their 
own hostnames, and do GRANT PROXYNODE, so that all the filespaces are backed up 
to a common nodename that is different from the hostname (make it "NASSHARES", 
for example).  That way when you go to do a restore, you'll always go to one 
place to look for the filespaces.  What is likely to happen is that over time 
some of the shares will grow, and you may need to redistribute them across 3 
proxy machines instead of 2, then nobody can remember where to look when 
starting a restore, etc. 

I have a customer where we have 4 proxy machines to back up 15 EMC shares.  (We 
don't dedicate machines as proxies - they have their own functions, but minimal 
backup needs - one is a backup domain controller, one is a Vcenter server - in 
other words, machines that don't have much else to do during backup hours.)  
Each proxy machine has a scheduler service installed to run its own backup, and 
each has a scheduler service that runs a proxied backup for the EMC shares 
under the name NASHOME.    When the helpdesk needs to do a restore, they always 
go to the same NASHOME machine to do the restore, and all the backups are 
visible and restorable from there.  The TSM Admin can move, shift, add, 
subtract shares to the proxy machine backups, without confusing everybody who 
might need to do a restore.  Proxy function very useful for that. 

W


-----Original Message-----
From: ADSM: Dist Stor Manager [mailto:ADSM-L AT VM.MARIST DOT EDU] On Behalf Of 
Leonard, Matthew
Sent: Sunday, March 16, 2014 2:23 PM
To: ADSM-L AT VM.MARIST DOT EDU
Subject: [ADSM-L] best/most effecient way to backup a CIFS Share

I'm trying to backup multiple CIFS shares and am trying to figure out the best 
way.  This is what we did and I would like to know if there is a better way.  
We are using TSM 6.2 with a VTL.

We setup two servers SXDCTPM and SXDCTPM01 and both are registered with Tivoli 
as nodes and assigned to daily schedules.  The options file is below for one of 
the servers.

NODENAME                      sxdctpm01
TCPSERVERADDRESS      sxdctsm01
schedlogretention          7
ERRORLOGRETENTION   7
compression                     no
COMPRESSALWAYS                         no
schedmode                        prompted
PASSWORDACCESS         GENERATE


exclude c:\...\*
include \\sxdcfs02\P2\...\*
include \\sxdcfs02\PACFinance\...\*
include \\sxdcfs02\PolarShare\...\*
include \\sxdcfs02\Public3\...\*
include \\sxdcfs02\PublicShare2\...\*
include \\sxdcfs02\Shared\...\*
include \\sxdcfs02\TRAX$\...\*
include \\sxdcfs02\XenTSRedir$\...\*

DOMAIN ALL-LOCAL
DOMAIN "\\sxdcfs02\P2"
DOMAIN "\\sxdcfs02\PACFinance"
DOMAIN "\\sxdcfs02\PolarShare"
DOMAIN "\\sxdcfs02\Public3"
DOMAIN "\\sxdcfs02\PublicShare2"
DOMAIN "\\sxdcfs02\Shared"
DOMAIN "\\sxdcfs02\TRAX$"
DOMAIN \\sxdcfs02\XenTSRedir$


Is this the best way to backup CIFS shares.  We are getting horrible 
performance and the backups seem to run  forever.  Is there a better way?  
Thanks

Regards,

Matthew J. Leonard
Network Infrastructure Administrator
IT Network Operations
AtlasAir, Inc.
Matthew.Leonard AT AtlasAir DOT com<mailto:Matthew.Leonard AT AtlasAir DOT com>
914-701-8042