Veritas-bu

Re: [Veritas-bu] Reduce Volume Pools

2008-10-14 03:21:20
Subject: Re: [Veritas-bu] Reduce Volume Pools
From: "WEAVER, Simon \(external\)" <simon.weaver AT astrium.eads DOT net>
To: <bob944 AT attglobal DOT net>, <veritas-bu AT mailman.eng.auburn DOT edu>
Date: Tue, 14 Oct 2008 07:57:48 +0100
Hi bob
1st - Yes this is one of many I sent (well 2 were important, the others
were replied to help others out!)

Im not sure what you find hard to understand; At the moment, we have
alot of Volume Pools for different systems. My aim is to try to reduce
the number of pools, which will help reduce the amount of tapes used.
What I am seeing is tapes not being fully untilised, and I want to try
to cram as much Data as possible.

To give you an example, lets say I have 5 SAP Servers. Each one has a
total of 3 Volume Pools (Offline Backups, Redo Log Backups and Online
Backups). 5 x 3 = 15 Volume Pools.

My aim was to reduce this down to say 3 pools (SAP OFFLINE, SAP ONLINE
and SAP REDO). Any SAP systems presently known to NetBackup or future
backups for SAP can use these pools. Thus, trying to help reduce the
amount of tapes in use.

I could of course be completely wrong in the angle I am looking at;
Hence why I posted this out in the first place. :-) Of course this was
an example - But I just wanted to see if there was any pros or cons to
this.

One possible CON is that if a redo job is being backed up, and I then
need to restore data from the tape the backup is using, the job wont run
until the backup is completed. But I dont imagine that would happen all
the time. Plus I could freeze the media to prevent anything else writing
to it.

Hope this helps Bob. Appreciate any advice or opinions you have. As far
as I can see, there is no Technical Reason behind all these volume
pools.
Simon 

-----Original Message-----
From: bob944 [mailto:bob944 AT attglobal DOT net] 
Sent: Tuesday, October 14, 2008 3:06 AM
To: veritas-bu AT mailman.eng.auburn DOT edu
Cc: WEAVER, Simon (external)
Subject: RE: [Veritas-bu] Reduce Volume Pools

First, if this is one of the class of "I do not appear to have a reply
to any emails I have sent for the past 2 weeks :-(" emails, then, FYI, I
haven't seen any of them so perhaps you really have had an outbound mail
problem.

> > Quick question; I am attempting to reduce the amount of volume pools

> > that are in use for each policy we have.
> > I want to group them together, but one thing I noticed is that they 
> > have different retentions.
> > 
> > I used to think that was a big "no no", but could someone advise if 
> > this is an issue in 5.1 MP5. I know the default is turned off.
> > 
> > The aim of the excercise is to try to use the smallest number of 
> > pools possible, and maximize the amount of data into the tapes, so 
> > they get full. I kind of would like to fill the tapes as much as 
> > poss

It's not at all clear to me what you are proposing.  If it's using
"allow_multiple_retentions_per_media", then, yes, you would no longer
have, say, a separate tape from pool X with 2-week retention daily
incremental data and another pool X with three-month retention weekly
fulls and another with one-year-retention monthly fulls--they could all
be on the same tape if that tape were available when those backups ran.
But unless you have a toy robot that only holds five tapes, this is
usually a really bad idea.  "Why" is left as an exercise for the reader.

The minimum number of pools to use is one, and that, IMO, should be your
(impractical) goal.  Use NetBackup, or name it after your datacenter or
your cat, but only use additional pools if there's a good technical
reason to.  A Unix pool and a Windows pool is not a good technical
reason.  "onsite" and "offsite" to ensure, for example, that an
inline-tape-copy will produce separated data so that one tape can be
sent away, is.

Don't forget that multiple media servers don't write to each others'
tapes (except in 6.5, if you choose the option to allow it).



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