He is correct.  In order for NBU to backup like a local device, which is
what you want in a SAN environement, you have to designate a storage device
for each of your SAN media servers.  What will happen, if you watch your
jobs kick off, it will show you the media server that it picks to do the
backup.  If it shows up as the media server you are backing up, then you are
basically doing a local backup straight to the tape library via the SAN.  If
it shows up as being another media server, then what you are doing is
backing your data up over the network.  When you define your classes, I have
found that if you pick Any Available on your storage units, it will pick
that media server first if it is not busy or if nothing is wrong with it.
If it is not available, it will go to another one and take it.  By choosing
Any Available, you pretty much guarantee that you will get your data backed
up weather over the SAN or the network.  By choosing a particular storage
device, your job can fail if there is something wrong.

Hope this helps.

Rick

-----Original Message-----
From: parker AT bctm DOT com [mailto:parker AT bctm DOT com]
Sent: Thursday, August 03, 2000 9:42 AM
To: veritas-bu AT mailman.eng.auburn DOT edu
Subject: [Veritas-bu] SAN media servers, SSO


Hi,

We're just in the process of installing netbackup for the first time,
and have a Veritas resource on site helping with the installation.

We're using a combination of a master server, a slave server and a
number of SAN media servers, with SSO licenses for our tape drives (all
version 3.2 at the moment).

Brief example - we have:

- master server 'diablo'
- slave server 'miura'
- SAN media server 'storm'
- 6 DLT drives in a single physical jukebox attached to our SAN and
  visible from all three systems
- 3 storage units defined (one per server above)

Our Veritas guy says that we need to set our classes up to use a single
storage unit rather than Any_available. This works fine in the above
setup as the three storage units are references to the same physical
jukebox, but we will actually be putting three physical jukeboxes on the
SAN... one of the things we thought the SAN and SSO bought us was the
ability to share ALL of our drives without having to think too hard
about it, but we're told we MUST identify a particular storage unit for
each class...

This seems wierd and backwards. Worse, with three jukeboxes and
ultimately 5 SAN media servers, a master and a slave, it looks like we
will need a total of 21 storage units defined, and will have to allocate
classes manually to each of these 21 storage units.

Is this correct? Are there any tricks to get around this or a different
way to configure this?

Thanks!

Ross
-- 
Ross Parker            |      UNIX Sys Admin, Perl and C,
Systems/Network Admin  |        Networking and security
Telus Mobility         |
                       |      Lisp has all the visual appeal of oatmeal
parker AT bctm DOT com        |   with fingernail clippings mixed in (Larry 
Wall)

_______________________________________________
Veritas-bu maillist  -  Veritas-bu AT mailman.eng.auburn DOT edu
http://mailman.eng.auburn.edu/mailman/listinfo/veritas-bu