This works well, but keep in mind that if a drive is DOWN it will wind up
being the one NOT used for backups, so the restore drive will be available
but DOWN.

On a similar note, I wish that in an SSO setup with 2 media servers and 10
drives, the workload got distributed evenly by the scheduler.  Currently it
will try to hand off the jobs in such a way that the first media server may
grab all the drives for use and media server 2 will be left out in the cold
with no available drives.  To compensate you lower the drive count in the
st_unit config, BUT this greatly limits how SSO provides resource sharing.
SO if I setup each st_unit to use 5 drives for backups each media server
will get a fair shake.  However if a media server goes down or is otherwise
unable to do backups the hardsetting of 5 per will prevent SSO from
recovering from the media server loss.  This can be changed thru st_unit
config in the case of a failure manually, but...

If there were some kind of supply (drives) vs. demand (jobs+media servers)
mechanism in NBU you could say:

If demand for drives is 20 (as above, 2hosts x 10drives) then distribute the
drives in manner X.
If demand for drives is 10 (as above one host down) then distribute the
drives in manner Y.

Or if the jobs just got handed out to the media servers in a round-robin
manner it might get past this hoarding of resources by the first media
server.


A.S.

-----Original Message-----
From: veritas-bu-admin AT mailman.eng.auburn DOT edu
[mailto:veritas-bu-admin AT mailman.eng.auburn DOT edu]On Behalf Of Larry
Kingery
Sent: Thursday, October 11, 2001 10:39 AM
To: Jason Ahrens
Cc: Veritas BU
Subject: Re: [Veritas-bu] Restore priority


Configure your storage unit to use less than the number of
physical drives.  Since restores do not use storage units,
they will be able to use the unused drives.

>
> Yesterday night, we had a system go down. The system was rebuilt and a
> restore was started to bring back the data.
>
> The restore was started just minutes after the backup window opened. This
> means taht the queue was full of backup jobs. It also appeared that the
> restore did not take priority over the backups, and it would have taken
> hours to wait for the queue to clear. This was not acceptable and we ended
> up killing all the backup jobs so the restore could happen, and requeued
all
> the backups.
>
> I'm thinking there has to be a better way.
>
> How can I instruct NetBackup to consider restores at a higher priority
than
> backups, so that when the first free drive and required tape becomes free,
> the restore will occur. I would't ask that backups in progress are
> halted/suspended for the restore, just that the restore go to the top of
the
> queue.
>
> Thanks
>
> Jason
>
> --
> Jason Ahrens
> Systems Administrator/Backup Specialist
> PSINet Limited
> http://www.psi.ca
> The Internet SuperCarrier
>
> _______________________________________________
> Veritas-bu maillist  -  Veritas-bu AT mailman.eng.auburn DOT edu
> http://mailman.eng.auburn.edu/mailman/listinfo/veritas-bu
>

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