Hi.

We too have DD880 and NW 7.5.2, and we see the exact same thing as you do,
these annoying error messages and tapes stuck inside virtual tape drives.

The best advise I can give, based on my own experience is, like is has been
said here on the list, to create and label  a lot of tapes ind advance.
Empty tapes does not take up any space, or alt least not a measureable
space, on the DD880, the only "problem" is that we as humans tend to get
confused.

In our case, we have two DD880 equipped with max storage capacity at two
different locations. On each DD880 we have two virtual libraries, one that
are being replicated to the other site, and one that not are supposed to be
replicated.
The VTL's that don´t get replicated are populated with small tapes, 100 GB
in order to make it easier to free up space.

We too are running target and parallism =1 on the virtual drives as this is
the recommended setting, and when we started using the DD880´s we created a
lot of drives based on the daily max session, but now we only have approx 15
drives enabled pr. VTL, the remaining drives ar not removed, the are in
service mode and can be enabled if we see too many stuck tapes.

I do not think it is a matter of persistend naming as we have the same issue
on both DD880, and one is with persistent naming, and the other is not.
Timming could be an issue, but then again, we have tried with a lot of
different settings and do not see any noticeable difference.

This is proberly not an isolated DataDomain issue as we had the same issue
on two EMC EDL´s in the past.
We have decided to ignoring the error messages for now and see if an upgrade
of Networker will make any difference.

Best regards
Ole Hermansen


-----Original Message-----
From: EMC NetWorker discussion [mailto:NETWORKER AT LISTSERV.TEMPLE DOT EDU] On
Behalf Of rmumford
Sent: 22. september 2010 22:14
To: NETWORKER AT LISTSERV.TEMPLE DOT EDU
Subject: [Networker] False "Tape is either disabled or in service mode"
message


Running NW 7.5.2 with Data Domain DD880 in VTL mode. When a backup with
several clients kicks off, NW may want to mount 12 or more tapes (tape
sessions are set to 1 per data domain). We get several of the red arrows
with a message like this: "Device `rd=nt2legatok4.emn.com:\\.\Tape0' is
either disabled or in service mode." These are not true as the tape drive is
not disabled or in service mode, and if you look further you'll see that the
volume it is trying to load is already mounted on another drive and may even
be writing at the time. I suspect it has something to do with sessions being
set to 1, but I've logged an SR with EMC and they have not yet suggested
that. Updating the tape drivers (this is windows 2003 for the server and
win2008 for the storage nodes) has not helped. 

Is anyone else running NW with DD880 VTL, and is anyone else seeing these
kinds of messages.? 

Thanks

Robert D Mumford

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