George,
Sounds like you found yourself in a bowl of spaghetti with just a spoon
to eat your way out.
Some general recommendations:
1. Check all of your tapes for different generations of media. There may
be a mix of JA, JB and JC media.
2. Assuming that you have both onsite and offsite tape pools, you may want
to create two virtual libraries using ALMS and designate one for onsite
use and the other for offsite os some other easy to manage scheme to
differentiate their use.
3. Thinking ahead to manage & growth, you will need to divide the media
and assign a volser range to assign to each library. If you do have
different generation of media(JA,JB,JC), then it is relatively simple to
assign one generation to each virtual library but if all media is say, JB
media, then you will need to specify volser ranges for each library and
when you get a new set of media in the current sequence, you will need to
assign new volser ranges for each virtual library - not difficult just
another thing to manage.
Cheers,
Neil Strand
From: George Huebschman <george.huebschman AT PNC DOT COM>
To: ADSM-L AT VM.MARIST DOT EDU,
Date: 03/11/2014 01:56 PM
Subject: [ADSM-L] Tape Drive compatibility
Sent by: "ADSM: Dist Stor Manager" <ADSM-L AT VM.MARIST DOT EDU>
My question is:
Is there a way to determine what tapes in a 3584 library have been written
to by E05 or E06 3592 tape drives?
Because:
I have a library with two generations of drives.
I discovered this morning that my DR Tape Library had no scratch tapes. I
expected around 200.
I found that I had 167 libvolumes that were marked "Private" with no last
use.
I checked and found that they were not in volhistory, so I updated them to
scratch status.
Then I wanted to know why.
I found a drive offline, with an online path. I offlined the path until I
could determine why the drive was offline.
I queried the actlog for a plethora of error messages over the last day. I
wondered if I would see a lot of attempts to use the path to the drive
that was offline, but I didn't.
I saw a number of "ANR8779E Unable to open drive" errors matched with
"ANR8381E 3592 volume Volser01 could not be mounted in drive 3592_x", for
a different drive, just one. TSM used that one drive and eventually tried
all the scratch media and marked them private.
I tried again forcing TSM to use different E05 drives with the same
result. ( I think all my scratch media is now formatted for E06.)
I WAS able to run a DB backup to an E06 tape drive by taking all of the
E06 tape paths offline.
When the newer tape drives were installed, it was believed that they
would be compatible with the earlier drives. (before my time here)
But, while they can read tapes written by E05, the E05 can not read or
write to tapes written by an E06 drive.
I could just turn off the two E06 tape drives, I will still have six E05
drives. But that leaves me with two problems that I see.
- Tapes written to by E06 will be unusable.
- Any tapes brought from Production (Export tapes, DB tapes, Data) would
be unreadable, because Prod is only using E06 tape drives. (Because we had
this same problem there.) (Of course, I can always put the E06 Path back
online as needed.)
George Huebschman (George H.)
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