We have a tape library (Oracle/Sun/STK SL500) which contains both LTO-4
and LTO-5 drives, and both LTO-4 and LTO-5 media. I am trying to keep
TSM from mounting an LTO-4 cartridge in an LTO-5 drive, but it is
insisting on doing it anyway.

We have 4 LTO-4 drives and 3 LTO-5 drives. The mount limits for the two
devclasses are set accordingly - to 4 for the LTO-4 devclass and 3 for
the LTO-5 devclass. When a request to mount an LTO-4 cartridge comes, it
seems to use any of the 7 drives, regardless of whether it is an LTO-4
or LTO-5 drive. Therefore some tape mounts for LTO-5 cartridges are
failing or being delayed due to there being no available LTO-5 drives
when some of them are occupied by LTO-4 tapes. This is despite the claim
in the section of the TSM Administrator's Guide for AIX servers titled
"Mount limits in LTO mixed-media environments" (on book page 221 /
physical page 249 in TSM V6.2 for AIX, or book page 198 / physical page
232 at V6.3) that setting the mountlimit to the actual number of
earlier-generation drives will prevent the use of later-generation
drives for the earlier-generation devclass.

BTW, this is a library manager configuration, which may complicate
things. The devclass definititions do match on the library manager and
both of its library clients. The library manager is at 6.2.2.30, and its
two clients are at 5.5.6.0 and 6.2.2.30.

So, the question is, how do I prevent LTO-4 cartridges from being
mounted in LTO-5 drives? I would prefer not to use the hardware library
partitioning feature, which has its own set of hassles.

Roger Deschner      University of Illinois at Chicago     rogerd AT uic DOT edu
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