Unfortunately, I no longer have the time to help people debug usage
problems, which I actually enjoy doing, but the other users on this
Bacula email list should be able to help you resolve this.  I do have a
few remarks:

1. There is no reason to set the VolumePoolInterval to anything other
than the default, especially for disk volumes.  Doing so could cause the
SD to consume a lot of unnecessary CPU time if there is an outstanding
mount message.

2. Forcing Bacula to use only one concurrent job per drive is not making
best use of your hardware.  In general, unless you have special needs
(security, tight restore SLAs,...), it is *far* better from operational
and performance standpoints to let Bacula write multiple simultaneous
jobs on a single drive (perhaps 5-10).  This will permit the OS to
reduce disk head movement.

Unfortunately neither of the above points will resolve the problem you
are seeing.

While you have provided some important input, what is missing is the job
log output including the mount message and a listing the volumes known
to the catalog DB (list volumes).

To reassure you, although I have not explicitly tried or tested writing
to multiple disk drives using some of the techniques recently discussed
on this list, I am 100% sure that the Virtual Autochanger code does work
exceptionally well with a single disk drive as is your case, providing
you really have labeled volumes that are available.

Note, by turning on a debug level of probably 100 to 150 in the
Director, and possibly also in the SD, you should be able to "see" more
clearly why the Director/SD cannot find any volumes that are ready to use.

Best regards,
Kern


On 11/15/2014 12:17 AM, Brady, Mike wrote:
> First of all thanks to Kern and Bacula Systems for making the "Best 
> Practices for Disk Based Backup" and "Disk Back Design" documents 
> available.
>
> I have been playing around with the best way for doing concurrent 
> backups for a while and these documents have helped my understanding 
> considerably.  Using a Virtual Autochanger in particular seems an 
> elegant way of doing what I would like to do.
>
> However, I am seeing some behaviour in my testing that I did not expect 
> and I need some input.
>
> At a high level what I am trying to do is use a Virtual Autochanger to 
> write to multiple volumes in the same pool concurrently.
>
> At the moment I have two devices limited to one concurrent job each.  
> Which, if I have understood things correctly, means that I should have 
> two jobs running concurrently writing to separate volumes.  The schedule 
> below kicks off eight jobs simultaneously with the number of devices 
> limiting concurrency.
>
> This issue that I am having is that the first job gets FileChgr1-Dev1 
> and a volume as expected.
>
> The second job gets device FileChgr1-Dev2 as expected, but always says 
> "Cannot find any appendable volumes." and issues a mount request.  There 
> are multiple purged volumes with the recycle flag set available in the 
> IncPoool pool. Even if there weren't, the pool has Auto Labelling 
> configured and has not reached the MaximumVolumes limit, so there should 
> "always" be a volume available.
>
> Other jobs continue to use the FileChgr1-Dev1 as it becomes available 
> while FileChgr1-Dev2 is waiting for a volume.
>
> The second job eventually retries on FileChgr1-Dev2, gets an available 
> volume and successfully completes without any operator intervention.
>
> After this the remaining jobs utilise both FileChgr1-Dev1 and 
> FileChgr1-Dev2 as they become available as I expected.
>
> Is this behaviour expected (I am assuming some sort of race condition at 
> the start of the schedule with multiple jobs trying to get a volume at 
> the same time) or am I trying to do something fundamentally wrong here?
>
> My configuration is:
>
> Pool {
>    Name = IncPool
>    Pool Type = Backup
>    Volume Use Duration = 23 hours
>    Recycle = yes
>    Action On Purge = Truncate
>    Auto Prune = yes
>    Maximum Volumes = 50
>    Volume Retention = 2 weeks
>    Storage = FileStorage01
>    Next Pool = "IncPoolCopy"
>    Label Format = "IncPool-"
> }
>
> Storage {
>    Name = FileStorage01
>    Address = 192.168.42.45
>    SDPort = 9103
>    Password = ***************************
>    Device = FileChgr1
>    Media Type = File01
>    Maximum Concurrent Jobs = 10
>    Autochanger = yes
> }
>
> Autochanger {
>    Name = FileChgr1
>    Device = FileChgr1-Dev1, FileChgr1-Dev2
>    Changer Command = /dev/null # For  7.0.0 and newer releases.
>    # Changer Command = "" # For 5.2 and older releases.
>    Changer Device = /dev/null
> }
>
> Device {
>    Name = FileChgr1-Dev1
>    Drive Index = 0
>    Media Type = File01
>    Archive Device = /bacula_storage/FileDevice
>    LabelMedia = yes;
>    Random Access = Yes;
>    AutomaticMount = yes;
>    RemovableMedia = no;
>    AlwaysOpen = no;
>    Maximum Concurrent Jobs = 1
>    VolumePollInterval = 5s
>    Autochanger = yes
> }
>
> Device {
>    Name = FileChgr1-Dev2
>    Drive Index = 1
>    MediaType = File01
>    ArchiveDevice = /bacula_storage/FileDevice
>    LabelMedia = yes;
>    RandomAccess = Yes;
>    AutomaticMount = yes;
>    RemovableMedia = no;
>    AlwaysOpen = no;
>    MaximumConcurrent Jobs = 1
>    VolumePollInterval = 5s
>    Autochanger = yes
> }
>
> Schedule {
>    Name = "DefaultBackupCycle"
>    Run = Level=Full 1st sun at 00:10
>    Run = Level=Differential 2nd-5th sun at 00:10
>    Run = Level=Incremental mon-sat at 00:10
> }
>
> Thanks
>
> Mike
>
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