Not sure if you've picked your VTL unit yet..

We're using the ADIC (now Quantum) Pathlight VX for our VTL. Mostly, it's 
sharing out virtual LTO3s to our four NetWare cluster servers (with some nifty 
linux master scripting to track the mounted volumes) and two Oracle 9i RAC 
servers.

The Pathlight handles the virtual-to-physical connection automatically and the 
barcodes are consistent between the virtual and physical, so I can plug it into 
a physical autoloader and it'd be the same). 

We're not doing multiplexing on ours as it's primarily there to handle data off 
of our SAN. I do have just a bunch of locally attached disk (and a fc-attached 
jbod with linux software raid) set up as a dssu for our slower 100meg lan-bound 
boxes.

I think the way you've described your clients-to-drives setup, I'd go with 
fewer virtual drives unless you need all of these clients to act as their own 
media server (and back themselves up), or if you *have to have* them all 
writing at the same time.

-----Original Message-----
> 
> Hi everyone,
> 
> I'm new using VTL with netbackup.
> 
> I was hoping anyone here already implemented such a setup in their current
> environment and hope share your general setup plan? I'm now planing for
such
> a setup and only have experience using normal tape libraries.
> 
> I understand that VTL able to create multiple tape libraries and tape
drives.
> If i'm cloning data that already backup in VTL to the actual tape library,
> what is the common practice? script? netbackup? 
> 
> Let's say if i have 100 clients and i do not use multiplexing and instead
> creating 100 virtual tape drives, does it mean that i need 100 LTO3 tape
when
> i do cloning? Will the activity monitor display backup failure from VTL to
> the normal tape library?
> 
> Any help is much appreciated. Thank you in advance