Adding new LTO2 drives

[charris]

We've got the following setup:

TSM 5.1.7 on AIX 5.1

3584 library

6 x LTO g1 drives



I need to add two LTO2 drives to the mix and I can't seem to get it to work.

I've created a new device class for the LTO2 drives, and have tried defining the new drive, but upon a 'q drive' command, the "device type" comes up as "UNKNOWN". When I try to define the drive, I can not autodetect the element, it gives me the following error:



tsm: ADSM>define drive 3584lib rmt7 online=yes element=autod

ANR8366E DEFINE DRIVE: Invalid value for ELEMENT parameter.

ANS8001I Return code 3.



Is this an issue with the device driver perhaps?

If I can't autodetect, how do I figure out what the element number is?

How do I get TSM to recognize the "device type" as "LTO2"?



One more thing, I can't seem to search these forums. Every search string I've ever typed in returns no results. What am I doing wrong?



Thanks,

ch

 

[heada]

Make sure you have the lastest/greatest Atape driver for AIX. I know there were major headaches getting LTO2 to work without it.



Also, I didn't think the AutoDetect feature was available until TSM 5.2 I may have an old manual or it was provided in a later release, but I don't see anything about it until TSM 5.2 when it's the default.



ftp://service.boulder.ibm.com/storage/devdrvr/AIX/



-Aaron

 

[charris]

I've made some significant headway.

Downloaded the newest drivers, which fixed the first problem. Thanks Aaron. Now I'm having some new problems.



I've logically partitioned my library

the old one, 3584lib (with old lto drives)

and the new one, 3584lib2 (with lto2 drives)



Everything seemed to work perfectly... at first. I checked a bunch of lto2 volumes into the new logical library and did a database backup to an lto2 drive. It worked! I was happy. Then, my backup stgpool ended and it tried to put the old lto tapes away... only to find that the slots were not empty. It appears that the old library (3584lib) was unaware that the new library (3584lib2) had put volumes into the (formerly) empty slots. TSM marked the old volumes unavailable, and lost them somewhere in the library. I had to audit the library to get them back.



What do I need to do so that my two logical libraries share information about open/full slots? Is there some way to delegate specific slots to a specific logical library?



How have you done this in the past?

thanks

ch

 

[charris]

Should've posted a resolution for this a while ago...



From what I can tell, there's no way to share tapes between two logical libraries. That doesn't really surprise me, but I believe we were told otherwise at the beginning.



--

11 steps we had to take:



1. Define the logical library on the library itself. You'll have to specify on the library how many slots will be needed, and which drives belong to each logical library. I manually rearranged the volumes, moving the old devclass volumes out of the new logical library's slots. I don't know if TSM would do this automatically or not.

2. Install most current drivers. AIX could see the drives, but called them "FC thingies" or something technical like that.

3. Remove all tape devices, including the library (rmdev -l smc0 -d, rmdev -l rmt1 -d, etc...)

4. Re-add all tape devices (cfgmgr). Now that you've defined the logical library on the library itself, when you do lsdev -Cc tape, you should see two libraries (probably smc0 and smc1)

5. Remove all paths and their corresponding libraries and drives in TSM (del path... del drive... del libr)

6. Define new libraries, drives, and paths in TSM (define libr... defin path... defin dri... defin path...)

7. Create new device class for 2nd library (define devc...)

8. Create new storage pool for new device class (define stg...)

9. Check-in old library volumes (checkin libv OLDLIB search=yes...) This assumes that you don't have any volumes from the new devclass in the library already.

10. Label/Check-in new library volumes (label libv NEWLIB...)

11. Add/Change management classes and/or policy domains as appropriate.



I ran into a stumbling block because AIX decided to reassign the element IDs for most of the drives. The new drives used to be rmt7 and rmt8, but after the cfgmgr, they were rmt3 and rmt4. old rmt3 and rmt4 were then new rmt5/6, and old rmt5/6 were new rmt7/8. If you suddenly see a bunch of tapes being marked unavailable, your paths are likely incorrect.



If you want to know a nifty way to figure out what the element IDs are, let me know and I'll explain that whole mess.