The DataONTAP manuals go into some detail about how to configure shared 
drives, and the use of the scsi reservations.  As I read it this is only 
really designed if you are using the native 'dump' kind of backups.

In theory you may be able to do what you want if you follow the NetApp 
configuration rules for their drive sharing.  Ideally you would then 
schedule your jobs so they never try to run on two filers that share a 
drive (so no conflicts can occur).   You'd have to try it out to see what 
happens otherwise; I guess NetBackup may retry a backup, or it may down 
the drive. 

I'm not sure NetBackup can cope with the configuration if the drives are 
robotic (almost sure to be!).   I doubt it letting you configure NDMP 
drives as shared drives.

William D L Brown




Mark.Donaldson AT cexp DOT com 
Sent by: veritas-bu-admin AT mailman.eng.auburn DOT edu
09-Dec-2005 22:42
 
To
veritas-bu AT mailman.eng.auburn DOT edu
cc

Subject
[Veritas-bu] NDMP question (drive sharing)






I've been crawling the NDMP manual for an hour but haven't found a
black-and-white answer yet.

I have a number of Netapp Filers and we're looking at implementing NDMP
backups (we currently just backup NFS mounts).  I know I cannot share a 
set
of drives between my NDMP hosts & my other media servers.  We're OK with 
the
idea of carving out a set of drives exclusively for NDMP backups (yes, I
know about v6.0 - we're not quite ready to convert yet).

What I can't figure out is if a single SAN-connected drive can be shared
directly with more than one filer.  I can see that if I do a 3rd-party 
NDMP
backup, the a single NDMP host can be used to backup the others.  I'd 
rather
not load one filer or media server with the backups of another.  I'd like
the blocks to go as directly to media as possible.

The drive setup seems to specify which NDMP host has direct access to the
drive, I guess to do what I want, I'd have to define the same robotic 
drive
on more than one NDMP host.  My initial goal is to remove 4 drives from my
regular drive config & share them between the 7 filers, each grabbing any
drive as required.

Baring this, an option would be to define a directly attached drive for 
each
filer, utilizing more drives, then build storage unit groups where each
filer would use their own storage unit first, failing to another 3rd-party
host only if their drive is already too busy.  So, can NDMP storage units 
be
grouped?

For those with v6.0, are your SSO sharing your drives with your filers and
how's it working out?

-M



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  Mark Donaldson - Systems Administrator - 303-664-2040
  Corporate Express - Broomfield, Colorado
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