Hello,
There may be many ways to accomplish what you have in mind, however, i
suggest careful planing with review of your environment, goals, backup
times,retentions, tape rotation schedules, SLA's and infrastructure,
before implementation, you may be limited by how, your VTL vendor licences
the product as well as your connectively to SAN ( Assuming you are using
FC )
It's hard to go backward and correct your mistakes once configuration is
in production, so plan accordingly.some of the major factors to consider
are dedupe on VTL, Tape sizes, being able to let Legato do the clone vs
using VTL capabilities ( i would prefer let legato do the cloning with
ssid scripted from the backup server)
See below for other suggestions
mark wragge <mark_t_wragge AT yahoo DOT ie>
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Subject
best way to configure a VTL
What is the best way to configure a HP VLS6200 virtual tape library in an
environment where I have one networker server and 4 networker storage
nodes? I can think of three options.
(1) I am thinking that the best way to configure this is to create one
tape library and 10 virtual tape devices. I will then present 2 virtual
tape devices to each of the storage nodes and server.
Depending on your environment size & backup requirements, i would look to
allocate apx 4 Tape drives to Master server and two each to the storage
nodes ( if you have backups and restore running at the same time , it
would help to have multiple drives)
I prefer fewer tape drives as possible along with as few Networker
groups\pools you can get away with, you may want to look into pool
retention policies as they will come handy.
You may need to devise scripts to recycle tapes sooner then your BP, if
VTL capacity is limiting factor, either way keep an eye on utilization and
make sure enough VTL tapes are available for backups.
You should ensure adequate pipelines for VTL and monitor performance of
the VTL drives\backups and clones.
You may want to consider, splitting your backups into test\prod client
groups so as to prioritize the backup schedule, You should also budget for
additional time it would take to backup to VTL and then clone ( if this is
what you have in mind),failed clones and process to resolve them.
It may be good to review your storage nodes for any connectivity
enhancement if needed & consider your restore objectives, one of the issue
with VTL and storage node is to ensure that your clones do not mount the
tape on different server then where they are writing to the physical tapes
otherwise the data will travel over network ( not ideal), you need to pay
attention to pool\devices and configure them as carefully to avoid this (
check into clone storagenode, restore storagenode attributes).
I like fast restores that VTL has to offer and possibility of replication
, dedupe etc.
(2) One other option is to create one virtual tape library and 4 virtual
tape devices. I will then configure the tape devices as shared tape
devices that are presented to the 4 storage nodes and server
NO, this is not good, the major benefit from VTL is to have the tapes
drives as needed without sharing, sharing increases your complexity,
wastes VTL capabilities and in the long run you would run into problems.
(3) another option is to create 5 virtual tape libraries and each library
will have 2 virtual tape devices. one library will be presented to each of
the storage nodes and server.
Even worse, you are going to be hit by Networker tape lib licences and
managing different instances of VTL's Lib and that's the overhead you
don't want, unless you have multiple master Legato servers and
test\dev\production environments.
When you do this, you will severely limit VTL capabilities in terms of
capacity, free space and overalocation capabilities, could hinder your
ability to create unified environment and you may need multiple scripts to
manage your processes.
Any comments on the 3 options above are greatly appreciated.
Thanks, Mark
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