When your are creating additional drives, how are you breaking those
down on the HBA ports for the server, 4 drives per port, or what? 


-=-=-=
Jeffrey Leiss
Senior Infrastructure Analyst - ACS
jeff.leiss AT nwdc DOT net
503.466.6540
 

-----Original Message-----
From: EMC NetWorker discussion [mailto:NETWORKER AT LISTSERV.TEMPLE DOT EDU] On
Behalf Of Brian O'Neill
Sent: Tuesday, March 27, 2007 12:40 PM
To: NETWORKER AT LISTSERV.TEMPLE DOT EDU
Subject: Re: [Networker] New server setup - VTL and LTO3 tape library
for staging - best practices

I've seen the reply from Mark Davis, but I have not seen any others. 
Does anyone else have input on this?

Brian O'Neill wrote:
> OK, I'm about to embark on setting up a new Legato server to replace 
> our venerable Sun 450 with P3000 library. It is my first adventure 
> with a VTL, and using staging/cloning to any great extent.
> 
> I've read many posts regarding setting up VTLs, etc., and I just want 
> to gather all of it and see if I've got it straight, and pose a few 
> extra questions while I wait for the hardware vendor to plug it all
in.
> 
> For the hardware, the server is a Dell 1950 dual-core with FC and 
> Ultra/320 SCSI PCIe boards and hardware-mirrored 300GB SAS drives.
> 
> The VTL is a Quantum DX3000 connected via FC - I forget the total 
> capacity we ordered offhand.
> 
> The tape library is a Quantum PX502 with two LTO3 tape drives with 
> SCSI connection. This will be used for staging to tape for offsite
storage.
> 
> I plan to continue using Networker 7.2.2, although there are no plans 
> to migrate the current saveset info - we'll start fresh.
> 
> ==== VTL configuration
> 
> I understand people have been recommending configuring as many virtual

> tape drives as you can, and setting the parallelism for each to 1. Our

> current license (Network Edition) limits us to 16 devices, so that is 
> our upper limit, which I don't think is a problem for us (I stagger 
> backups).
> 
> Should I also set server parallelism to 16? I understand that 
> regardless of device parallelism, it will add more sessions to drives 
> if the server parallelism is set higher than the total.
> 
> I know this was to avoid multiplexing - but was this relevant to the 
> VTL performance, restores, or was it more for staging later?
> 
> What advantages/disadvantages are there to choosing P1000 vs. P7000
vs. 
> DX3000 emulation? Is the DX3000 as "supported" type in 7.2.2?
> 
> What about DLT7000 vs. LTO-2 for the virtual tape drives? DLT happens 
> to be what we use now, but that should have no relevance here.
> 
> What is the purpose of defining empty bins? Is this just for virtual 
> migration of cartridges?
> 
> ==== Staging
> 
> I've done some D2D2T staging before, but only on a small scale. Given 
> that I have LTO-3 drives, I know keeping write performance up is a 
> consideration, and I don't need to use both drives at once - we got 
> two more for redundancy.
> 
> We plan to keep our current schedule of moving tapes with the backups 
> offsite on a weekly basis, so I would need to stage all (except 
> perhaps the most recent) savesets to tape prior to removal.
> 
> I've used nsrstage manually, which "deletes" the old saveset, and I am

> aware of the automatic staging which stages based on age and/or space 
> (although that may only apply to file/adv_file types?)
> 
> Ideally, I'd like to keep as much on the VTL as possible (for restore 
> purposes), and still stage everything to tape for the weekly tape
pull.
> We could do the staging once a week, or as needed - it doesn't matter.

> How best to set this up? I assume we'll have to set up cloning in some

> fashion - but how to we "expire" the originals on the VTL faster?
> 
> I think that's it for now.
> 
> -Brian
> 
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