Hi Jeff, 

- assigned 
  NetBackup has assigned a tape drive to a media server for a particular
  mount request.
  
- reserved
  bptm on a media server has issued a SCSI reserve command to the tape 
  drive. After reserve, the tape drive rejects read/write requests from other
  initiators than the initiator that issued the reserve. This is to protect
  usage of a tape drive by multiple hosts at the same time. 
  
About correlation: AFAIK, vmdareq queries the vmd/DA host, which is normally 
the 
volume database host which, in turn, is normally the master server. The vmd/DA 
host manages the availability of the drives amongst the different mediaservers.
Normally, vmd on a media server queries the vmd/DA host and updates the local 
database accordingly. Vmoprcmd determines the drive status by this local stored 
database. Therefore, the output of vmoprcmd should "follow" the output of 
vmdareq. 

I believe I have exact the same problem as you do/did: 5 45_MP2 media servers 
running Solaris. Some of them, sometimes, do not issue a SCSI release command 
after a backup is finished. Therefore , the drive is not usable by other media 
servers and are eventually DOWNned. We "fix" this by running 'vmoprcmd 
-crawlreleasebyname <drivename>' and 'vmoprcmd -upbyname' on the locked 
tapedrives. 

Would you mind sharing some more information (possibly offline) regarding this 
problem?

Best regards, 

Joost

>We use the following two programs to get information:
>
>/usr/openv/volmgr/bin/vmdareq
>/usr/openv/volmgr/bin/vmoprcmd
>
>vmdareq shows the scanhost and the reserved tapedrives. vmoprcmd shows which
>tapedrives are assigned and the mounted tapes.
>
>What, exactly, is the difference between reserved and assigned?
>
>Also, does anyone know the correlation between these two programs? We have a
>situation where a drive is "locked", IE reserved and assigned to a
>particular media server. We try using vmdareq -release to free up the drive
>(even reserving it to another server) but that change does not show in
>vmoprcmd and when the backups run, the drive is still considered locked.
>
>The only way, it seems, to free up the tapedrives that are assigned and
>reserved (after backups have finished running, this is part of a larger
>problem) is to restart the daemons.
>
>Any help appreciated,
>
>Jeff
>
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Long may you run.