Ok I see. 

In allot of setups I see they are no longer running media servers but rather multiple masters that also do MSDP and then use AIR and replicate between sites for dr purposes.

So since I did not know your setup I was asking.

I would say 130 is a bare minimum and I can find the link if you want I know that with the latest releases we have updated the minimum requirements. At least for ram which you are still over the minimum. I do not know if we have updated the minimum requrements for underlying i/o. At 130 it is with degraded performance.

So the cache still runs the same in 7.5.0.5 as far as that goes. So there is something going on for sure with that and migrating the catalog could easily account for that.

However the thing you mention that is interesting to me is that the disk appears to be fine but that you have to run nbdevconfig to bring it up. Since the services associated with the dedupe storage are independent of netbackup this might suggest something going on with the netbackup processes were it is not properly showing the disk online once the disk comes up. 

There may still be a delay with the dedupe pool coming up but netbackup should mark it as up once it is online.

if you don't have more like 200mb/s or more and you do quite a bit of backups with the system it could also be that your tlog queue could be getting behind. I have seen this often in busy environments. The reason this casues a delay is that when reading the cache into ram after it gets done reading the bin files it will then read through the tlogs to find updates to the cache. This can take a long time if your queue is large. 

You could find out how many files are in your <storage location>\queue folder and let me know.

also under <storage location>\logs\spoold\spoold.log if you could find out how many transactions it is processing in about a 10 minute period that would be helpfull. This log file gives a time stamp and tells you how many transactions it processed so it's pretty easy to go through and see how much you are processing.

Thanks

My point was that the 2 articles quoted were nothing to do with MSDP; rather the v7.5 upgrade process itself and the image Metadata move.  This is all releated to the Master Server upgrade.

I am refering to my MSDP units which are on a seperate Media Servers.

I have read the tech note you have listed.  My MSDP servers meet and exceed the requirements.  There is plenty of RAM, 32GB for my locally attached 15TB disk storage which also exceeds the 130MB/s minimum IO.  There is no paging going on.

Under v7.1.0.4 the deduplication engine (spoold) would start and load the cache in the background; now under v7.5.0.5 it appears to do this in the foreground and does not release the startup process to continue on until this cache load has finished.

I hear this is all greatly improved under v7.6 anyway.

My bigger issue is that for one of my MSDP media servers the PureDisk pool never comes "up"; I have to issue a:

nbdevconfig -changestate  -stype PureDisk -dp Dedupe-Pool -dv PureDiskVolume -state RESET

command to get it to come "UP" and online for use.  Symantec are still looking at this.

Yes they are relevant because it causes i/o on your disk subsystem and MSDP is very i/o dependent so with two sets of processes stressing your disks things take longer.

Durring startup it is caching the fingerprint hashes into ram and to do this is reads them from the storage containers on disk. Untill it's done caching the services will not be available to accept a connection. 

Depending on the size of your dedupe pool and the speed of your storage disk for your MSDP pool it can effect startup times greatly. Also if your ram is not sufficient then it will be hiting the pagefile on your c drive witch impacts total system performance.

How much storage do you have?

How much ram do you have?

What are you using for your backend storage? SAN/Fiber? locally attached disks? iSCSI(not supported)? NFS(also not suppprted)?

What is your backend performance?

You can check this technote for further information on backend performance. It discusses errors you may not be having but will also tell you a little about how to figure out your performance:

http://www.symantec.com/docs/TECH156743

If you have any further questions please let me know

Thanks

Not sure either of the above are relevant.  I am refering to MSDP unit startup; your 2 articles are refering to the v7.5 upgrade and the image metadata move.  I have done this upgrade with no issues.  It is one of my media servers servers with an MSDP pool that has issues.

During the upgrade to NetBackup 7.5 the Image Metadata is moved into NBDB

Symantec NetBackup 7.5 Upgrade Guide

http://www.symantec.com/business/support/index?page=content&id=DOC5198