Re: change order of hosts to be backed up

On 2006-06-01 10:57, Dennis Ortsen wrote:

On 5/31/06, Paul Bijnens <paul.bijnens AT xplanation DOT com> wrote:
[snip]

>
> What I'm interested in, is there any way to specify the exact order in
> the disklist for the DLE's to be backed up? For example: I have hosts
> mars venus and jupiter. In alphabetical order that would be:
>
> jupiter
> mars
> venus
>
> Now, what if I wasn't able to use a holding disk for parallel dumping
> (which means all DLE's are dumped sequentially) and I wanted host
> venus to be backed up first. Is there any way I can achieve this?
> Using a holding disk is an option offcourse, but what if I should be
> able to manage without a holding disk if I could only change the order
> the hosts are backed up. What can I do to achieve that?

There is "dumporder", which can order dumps by of size, time, or
bandwith, but not alfabetically.

And there is the dumptype option "starttime" where you can
delay the starttime of some DLE's/hosts.

It would help if you specified why you would like a specific order.

Are you trying to accomplish something like:
http://wiki.zmanda.com/index.php/Filling_a_tape_to_100%25 ?

[snip]

Yeah, something similar. My reason is not the inefficient usage of a
tape (i'm using the virtual tape setup). I only want to achieve this,
so I can be sure that the largest dump is finished first. In other
words, when *production*  starts in the morning the backup on that
specific DLE (venus) has been done (roughly 120 GB in that directory
alone) and the gzip/tar processes won't be active anymore. As some
people might say that it could slow down production time. I start the
dump on 9:00 PM, the estimate for this host (venus) is finished at
around 9:35 PM. But there is another DLE (mars) that roughly has 80 GB
in a similar directory. That host (mars) is finished a little later
with the estimate (around 21:40) but it still gets dumped before the
*largest* DLE (venus)


Dumping starts when all the estimates are done.
Amanda needs the estimates to decide what to dump.


I have added:

dumporder "SSSS"
taperalgo largest

to the amanda.conf file (using 4 dumpers as a maximum).



When you are not using a holdingdisk, there is effectively only
one dumper running.  If you are using a holdingdisk, but some of the
DLE's don't fit, then those DLE's are always scheduled at the end of
the run.
Actually, I'm not exactly sure of that last statement (and don't have
the time to read the source code), but it is what I observed when I
had that situation a few years back.  Maybe it is a side effect of
the fact that as long as there are dumps to flush in the holdingdisk,
then the dumps bypassing holdingdisk have to wait, because the tape
is still busy.  Maybe with one dumper looking for the largest dump to
start first, this does not happen.
I would like to know too.


Should I specify the following dumporder? "Ssss"? I have 30 DLE's in
this backup config.


Each dumper gets assigned a priority letter from the dumporder string.
In the "Ssss" case, 4 dumpers start, and one dumper will always look
for the next largest size dump.  The 3 other dumpers will always look
for the next smallest size dump.

I guess you need "SSSS".

You could specify a starttime in the dumptype for all DLE's but the
largest, that is just a little larger than the estimate time:
    starttime 2200
Once the large dump is started, the others have to wait (or dump to
holdingdisk in the meantime) until the large one is finished.


--
Paul Bijnens, xplanation Technology Services        Tel  +32 16 397.511
Technologielaan 21 bus 2, B-3001 Leuven, BELGIUM    Fax  +32 16 397.512
http://www.xplanation.com/          email:  Paul.Bijnens AT xplanation DOT com
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