On Fri, 7 Mar 2003 08:34:50 -0500, Jim Lane <JLane AT TORONTOHYDRO DOT COM> 
wrote:

>I've just read a couple of posts on this from yesterday and I'm
>confused. the replies tended to suggest that this value should be
>related in some way to the number of drives in the jukebox that
>Networker should use for backup, as against leave free for ad hoc usage,
>restores etc. I was told by the Legato consultant that this value is the
>maximum number of saveset streams that can be directed to all the drives
>in the jukebox at once. on that basis this number is supposed to be set
>at or above the sum of the "target sessions" for all the tape drives. at
>least that's what I was told. on that theory the Legato guy set the "max
>parallelism" in my 4-drive STK 9710 to 32. now I'm worried. who's right
>here? am I over-specifying this value?
>

Oh boy. Is this the same Legato consultant who messed you up a few weeks
ago? The guy needs a rocket, he is talking garbage. This value is nothing
like he says, it controls the number of nsrjb operations that can take
place simultaneously, this includes mounts, unmount, labels, inventories
etc. A value greater than the number of drives makes no sense at all,
although probably doesn't do any harm. You may get nsrjb processes queued
up waiting for others to complete - although it is possible that NetWorker
is clever enough to avoid this situation.

What the consultant has done is probably not dangerous, but totally
misguided. It worries me that this "expert" is giving out bad advice and
charging you for the privilege. Moreover he is giving Legato SMC a bad name.

I usually set this value to the same as the number of drives. On a small
library it is frustrating to do an inventory etc. with only one of two
available drives. The theory of keeping a drive free for restores is valid,
but you have to weigh up your preference. On larger libraries (10+ drives)
it is sometimes sensible to decrease the value considerably since the load
of running (say) 20 nsrjb processes can be too much of an overhead.

You need to reduce this value to a maximum of 4. You also need to complain
to Legato about this consultant.

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