I have a heavily clustered
environment with 27 Media Servers. Well, an ORACLE DB could fail over
from one server at any time. Well, when I originally setup the servers
with 1 or 2 drives each, there was not enough on a robot with 20 drives to
have the same robot on each media server. Well, what happens when the
server A goes down that points to robot 1, and the DB fails over to server B
and it only sees robot 2?!? I would have to scramble to make robot 1
visible on server B. I did see something in the VTL that might allow me
to transfer the tape over from one robot to another and then I guess I would
inventory the robot.... but alas I am unsure.
Interesting. I decided to go in a
different direction.
I allow
the master to control the robots.
as long
as both servers in your cluster see the same robot, they can see the same
tapes.
Issue 2.... I do all my vaulting
on my master server. Since my media servers are also production servers,
I do not want to hit them with so much IO for duplication. So the master
server needed to have tape drives on each robot.
Again, if the master controls the
robot and sees enough drives in each as you require to perform the
duplicating, it can see all the tapes, and perform all the
vaulting.
I actually use 1 virtual robot with 100
drives.
I allocate 25 drives to each of 4 media servers, one
being the master itself. Each server can see any tape in the
library.
Also, now I share the robots with
in the VCS clusters and make sure that each server in the cluster can see all
the robots. So, I can do restores with out any issues.
With one robot, it's a
non-issue.
Lastly, I don't have to generate
13 robots with 20 tape drives each to turn off multiplexing! Yes, that
is how many tape drives I would have needed to meet that demand.
Me
neither.
Paul
