I _Almost_ agree with Kelly. A restore will preempt any process
running on the same server, but with 6 TSM instances, chances are that
your restore is running on a TSM instance that has nothing to preempt,
while other instances are busy with eg. reclamation or other less
essential tasks.

On 22 sep 2009, at 19:58, Shawn Drew wrote:

HA, perfect!  I never knew about the AUTOLABEL option.    And
wouldn't you
know it, we have it enabled already.
I also just found out about "SET DRMCHECKLABEL".  I think that will
take
care of everything.

I don't have any useful counter ideas but I did have a thought: why
limit
it?  You can set the library to autolabel tapes so you don't need to
do
that as a separate function and a restore can pre-empt anything
running
(except a DB backup). You will wait a couple of minutes while the tape
dismounts and mounts.

I guess when one has 18 tape drives having two on the sideline
waiting to
do something isn't a bad idea.  18 tape drives!  And they're
probably the
big fast expensive ones too, aren't they?

Kelly Lipp
Chief Technical Officer
www.storserver.com
719-266-8777 x7105
STORServer solves your data backup challenges.
Once and for all.


-----Original Message-----
From: ADSM: Dist Stor Manager [mailto:ADSM-L AT VM.MARIST DOT EDU] On
Behalf Of
Shawn Drew
Sent: Tuesday, September 22, 2009 10:03 AM
To: ADSM-L AT VM.MARIST DOT EDU
Subject: [ADSM-L] Limiting number of drives used

I would like to keep 2 drives unused at all times for restores and
labeling scratch tapes.

TSM 5.5/AIX/Atape
We have 18 Drives, 1 library manager and 5 library clients.

The "classic" method is to set the "Mount limit" in the device class.
However, we also have NDMP clients which are configured so there is
more
than one device class pointing to the same library.

- I can't limit the NAS and LTO device classes each to 16 Drives
because
some of the time, jobs to both device classes will be running at the
same
time so the individual classes won't reach 16.
- I can't limit each to 8, because the NDMP jobs definitely need
more than
8 drives when they are running at night, and the other device class
needs
more than 8 during the day.

Can anyone suggest an alternate way to accomplish this?

--
Met vriendelijke groeten,

Remco Post
r.post AT plcs DOT nl
+31 6 248 21 622