EMC DD880 not supported/working with TSM (VTL certification expired)

[johansen]

hi all,

we have defined a POC in our company and decided to choose a DD880 for the "best" solution for us to use it with TSM.
after one month of fighting we are really lost and are near to send the box back to the vendor because it's not working in our productive environment.

We have following setup:
IBM p560
5 LPARs, AIX6100-06
Atape 12.1.5.0
TSM Server version 5.5.5.0
virtualized fiberchannel adapters with NPIV (18 fcs-devices per lpa)
3584 tape library with 30x rmt (lto3) devices
library manager communicating with smc0 (with alt-pathing enabled)

VTL emulation STK L180
VTL devices LTO3

Once we received the DD we have set up pools etc within the DD and connected it to the library manager and a library client.
library path: /dev/lb0
drives: /dev/rmt30 - /dev/rmt59

We have defined all lib-paths and drives in TSM (using NPIV) and received tons of errors and already after checkin of the scratch tapes from the VTL we received errors:

[SIZE=3][FONT=Times New Roman]ANR8840E Unable to open device /dev/lb0 with file handle 22.[/FONT][/SIZE]

after that we got 2 physical dual port FC adapter and installed them in the p560 and assigned them DIRECTLY (without NPIV) to the LPARs. One to the libr manager and one to the libr client.
We could use the VTL with multiple mount points nearly up to 3 hrs, but then suddently we received error messages again.

ANR8311E An I/O error occurred while accessing drive RMT36
                          (/dev/rmt36) for SETMODE operation, errno = 79, rc = 1.  
                          (SESSION: 2116)                                          
ANR8311E An I/O error occurred while accessing drive RMT49
                          (/dev/rmt49) for REW operation, errno = 79, rc = 1.      
                          (SESSION: 2118)                                          
ANR8311E An I/O error occurred while accessing drive RMT36
                          (/dev/rmt36) for OFFL operation, errno = 79, rc = 1.     
                          (SESSION: 2116)                                          
ANR8311E An I/O error occurred while accessing drive RMT49
                          (/dev/rmt49) for OFFL operation, errno = 79, rc = 1.     
                          (SESSION: 2118)   
                                       ANR8840E Unable to open device /dev/lb0 with file handle  
                          78. (SESSION: 2122)    
 
ANR8945W Scratch volume mount failed F00022. (SESSION:    
                          2122)                                                    
 ANR8381E LTO volume F00022 could not be mounted in drive  
                          RMT57 (/dev/rmt57). (SESSION: 2122)                      
ANR9790W Request to mount volume *SCRATCH* for library    
                          client TSM failed. (SESSION: 2122)

The drives and lb0 device(s) are available in AIX with lbtest f.e.


The "special" situation starts now:
- we have opened a ticket at IBM support and in the beginning they tried to help but suddenly this changed.
- the EMC DD is in support since 5.4.1 with IBM TSM
http://www-01.ibm.com/software/sysm...vices_for_AIXHPSUNWIN.html#LTO Tape Libraries

- BUT the certification of the L180 emulation is NOT supported anymore because the certification of DataDomain VTL expired!!
- so IBM cannot help us anymore and EMC actually tries to get the VTL supported again.
- On DD side there is a TS3200 emulation available with we should used (IBM told us to test) but this emulation is not supported from EMC (because it wasn't made for TSM).

this is the quote from IBM:

I summarized the support for Data Domain VTL from EMC:
The certification expired.
The VTL was tested with IBM LTO-3 so only IBM LTO-3 was supported.
The STK L180 emulation is not supported.

The customer should work with EMC and get the VTL supported again before using it with TSM to get L180 certified.
Since IBM LTO-3 is quite old, EMC might want to get recertified with IBM LTO-4.

EMC told us that many customers are using the DD together with TSM with L180 emulation without problems.

Does anyone of you had similar problems with with DD and TSM? Which emulation did you use?

Thanks a lot for you help!

 

[bhaven41]

I am using DD880 with TSM 5.4 on AIX 5.3 with physical FC adapter.

With TS3200 emulation - I got a lot of I/O errors, paths were going offline, audit library does not work when adding new tapes
With L180 emulation - everything works just fine.

When you say "the certification of the L180 emulation is NOT supported anymore because the certification of DataDomain VTL expired!!" -- does that mean VTl license in Data Domain is expired?

If the VTL license is expired - I do not think virtual library or drives will work until you re-activate it by getting valid keys from EMC.

 

[johansen]

thanks for your answer.

this has nothing to do with valid keys, because everything is licensed in our DD but the problem is that IBM has to validate the DataDomain so that they can give support for such devices. And this "support" has expired meaning that IBM will not give you support if you have a problem and when you are using L180 emulation.
That's our biggest problem at the moment. EMC has to get in touch with IBM to get the L180 (or any other emulation) support again.

PS: have you set anything special on AIX to use lb and rmt devices? (changed anything re. attributes f.e.?)

 

[Amos.Hagay]

Hi,

Im Using DD670 for the last 2 months, i also used L180 Emulation, because the TS3200 its for Microsoft DPM, but it not working also,
My DD is connected via Switch with 4 Fc, I have 2 Aix Servers Connected one with AIX6.1 and the second AIX5.3 both with TSM 5.5.5,
i didnt have a problem at all, and its work fine without any error,
But i think u need to check the initiator config, try to isolate the drives and the Library (when u add LUNS), because some time when u rediscover the devices via smitty dev, u can see 2 lb's

Amos

 

[bhaven41]

this has nothing to do with valid keys, because everything is licensed in our DD but the problem is that IBM has to validate the DataDomain so that they can give support for such devices.
And this "support" has expired meaning that IBM will not give you support if you have a problem and when you are using L180 emulation.
That's our biggest problem at the moment. EMC has to get in touch with IBM to get the L180 (or any other emulation) support again.

I am not aware of any such certification - where did you get this info from?
When I talked to IBM - they say "if the EMC can emulate the libr and configure a VTL that is a supported library by TSM, it should work. TSM does not discriminate between a VTL and a physical library as long as the library is configured properly and can be seen as a supported library in TSM."

PS: have you set anything special on AIX to use lb and rmt devices? (changed anything re. attributes f.e.?)

Nothing special - just used the TSM device drivers - lb0, lb1 etc

 

[johansen]

official information from IBM-TSM development team. STK L180 emulation is not supported anymore but I recently received feedback from EMC management and they are working together with the IBM ready tivoli team to get the certification back again.

the base problem we have is that even without using NPIV devices the DD "crashes" under huge load. we moved one of our 600GB pool to a virtual tape pool on the DD and it was working for about 2-3 hrs and we started getting file handle errors with /dev/lb0 in TSM and suddenly the DD rebooted!
Even if they say it's working I guess that performance degreeses a lot when putting the DD under high load (as dedup is done afterwards and not during the backup/copy proccess). that would explain the reason that it's working in the beginning and just after a while we receive such errors. maybe DD is not the best solution for our environment (7 TB primary filepools on a EMC CX 400, daily 12TB exchange full backup lanfree to tape with a average transfer rate of ~25MB/sec!) ...

 

[Amos.Hagay]

Hi,
I also checked with EMC the New DD/os will support and emulate IBM Tapes and Libraries , and the management will be easy,
beside of that, i backup fileservers (NT and Unix) more that 3 TB Incremental , and another 4 TB Difs of SQL and Exchange,
After alot of Dedupe Testing and Tuning, i send to the DD only the Exchange ,SQL, NDMP backups, because the Compress & Dedupe rate are Higher, the FS i send to Tape after one day (because the Dedupe rate its not so high, and i cant control all my 1500 Servers files),

and to be honest , i checked DD and ProtecTeir , the Compression are the same the dudupe are more or less the same, but the VTL Emulation and the configuration and the Management of the ProtecTier is better and very Simple.