Hi Steve,

This is the downer on VTL's. You do not get your "tape" space back
automatically. It is for these reasons I recommend that one never go
VTL's. NetBackup 6.0 and 6.5 allow disk to disk backups; the images are
easily replicated to an offsite facility.

The time for all "tape" has come and gone. The de-duplication facility
in 6.5 makes life even easier. Why VTL's (which does SCSI emulation)
when you and use disk which is faster and has more protection?

Clem.

-----Original Message-----
From: veritas-bu-bounces AT mailman.eng.auburn DOT edu
[mailto:veritas-bu-bounces AT mailman.eng.auburn DOT edu] On Behalf Of swaltner
Sent: 21 September 2007 17:32 PM
To: VERITAS-BU AT mailman.eng.auburn DOT edu
Subject: [Veritas-bu] Script to label expired tapes in a VTL


We deployed a VTL last month, which has been working very nicely. This
is in a NetBackup 5.1 environment with the VTL attached to our Solaris
based master server as well as to our NAS server for local NDMP backups.
One thing I'd like to do is over-subscribe on the back-end storage, but
before I do that I'd like to automate the process of freeing up the disk
space used in the VTL when a NetBackup tape is expired. Just curious if
anyone has already written such a beast and would like to share with me
as a starting point.

If not, I suspect I'll use the following logic:

- Every day (at noon??), query the robots defined in the VTL and keep a
record of tapes that are allocated.
- When a tape goes from allocated to non-allocated from one day to the
next, use a command like the following to erase the tape's contents:
bplabel -erase -o -d dlt -m VTL123

This would write a small label at the beginning of the virtual tape,
causing the VTL to drop all the other data that had been stored on the
tape.

Any reason this wouldn't work? Any gotchas with writing this script that
I should look out for?

Steve

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