Procedure for returning off site volumes to TSM

[sergchong]

I'm using DRM. Every day, the mountable volumes of the copy storage pool and the database backup volume are taken off site by moving them to the Vault state and they are automatically removed from the TSM Server. I've noticed that some dbbackup volumnes disappear from the Vault state but they don't pass to VaultRetrieve. When it happens, I have tried to check in those volumes together to the onsiteretrieve volumes but the TSM Server ignores them.



I Delete the volhistory every day.



What is going wrong ?



Thanks for your help.

 

[heada]

IF you are using DRM, do NOT delete the volume_history. TSM tracks the DB backup volumes in the DRM table of the database and in the volume history. If you delete the volume_history, it will make DBBackup tapes "disappear"



-Aaron

 

[sergchong]

Thanks for your reply. I solved the issue by auditing the library.



I also changed the scheduled task for deleting the entries in volhistory prior to the expiration of the oldest DBBackup. Is that correct ?



Thank You.

 

[heada]

In the manual, it says to not delete volume history if you are using DRM. DRM will handle all of that for you.



I have searched the current (5.3) manuals and can't find this anymore. I don't know if they no longer state this or if this requirement has been removed.



There have been several threads on this board that deal with this same issue.



-Aaron

 

[sergchong]

If I don't delete the volhistory entries, they will be cumulated.



When can I delete those entries to avoid volhistory growth ?

 

[heada]

DRM handles the tapes for you. DRM will remove them from the volume history file when they are returned to the scratch status.



DRM is written to handle moving volumes offsite, onsite and tracking them between. Let DRM do it's job.



I started using TSM back when it was ADSM 3.1 and we did a delete volhist until we started using TSM 4.1 and our database backup tapes started to disappear. I called IBM and asked them why, and the reply was that we were deleting them from the volume history and DRM couldn't manage them anymore. We stopped deleting the volume history and the tapes stopped disappearing. We have over 5000 tapes between 4 TSM servers and out volume history files are about 1MBb or less.



-Aaron