Spindler, Brian wrote:
Thank you Anuj. I will check the properties on my Groups.
You won't find what you want in the group properties. I think what Anuj
meant was that you can configure pools in such a way that certain groups
are restricted to certain drives. Well, yes you can, but it's usually a
bad plan to do this. Pools are a very powerful tool in NetWorker, but
many inexperienced users fall into the trap of overusing them. The
problem is that everything you configure about a pool is a RESTRICTION.
The more you configure, the less flexibility you have in your
configuration. For example if you restrict one group to only one drive,
you don't have the opportunity to make best uses of the drives available
at any point in time. You also don't have the spare capacity if one
drive goes faulty. The bigger your environment, the more you will be
affected by this. You will become very confused about what can backup to
where from which group, and also very confused about why a particular
backup is not using a particular pool or drive when you think it should.
If you are not careful, it can become unworkable.
My strategy with pools in almost all cases is to leave everything
unchecked except the relevant groups. The exception is usually for if I
want to backup index/bootstrap data, and even then I only configure the
minimum. I almost never create a situation where I would want to assign
a device or devices to a pool. Creating a new pool is not a decision I
take lightly, in general my justification for this is to accommodate
different retention policies, very rarely any other reason. This
strategy works well for me in environments with perhaps half a dozen
storage nodes and ~50 devices. It's the KISS strategy.
I think the simple answer to your original question lies in the settings
for target sessions and parallelisms. Target sessions applies on a per
drive basis, so setting it low will encourage your system to use more
drives. This will only happen if parallelism settings allow, there are
settings for server, client, and group parallelism, and if used wisely
these settings will allow you to tweak your system to get best use from
your drives. There is more to this than using all your drives too,
sometimes it is better not to use them all, for instance if there is not
enough data flowing it would be better to keep less drives streaming but
at better rates.
I hope this helps.
Thanks,
Brian
-----Original Message-----
From: Anuj Mediratta [mailto:anuj AT ACE-DATA DOT NET]
Sent: Tuesday, February 24, 2004 2:02 PM
To: NETWORKER AT LISTMAIL.TEMPLE DOT EDU
Subject: Re: [Networker] Tape utilization
Hi Brian,
If you have 4 groups to run simultaneously, you can select a specific
drive for each group while configuring the group properties.
Regards,
Anuj
On Tue, 24 Feb 2004 11:32:35 -0500, "Spindler, Brian"
<John.Spindler AT RUESCH DOT COM> wrote :
Legato 7.1
I have 4 tape drives and 9 times out of 10 only two of them are being
utilized. How can I make it so that all four will be used during
backups? Or how can I just make sure that whatever job it's doing only
needs two drives?
Thanks,
Brian
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