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Dan_Giberson's avatar
Dan_Giberson
Level 5
15 years ago
Solved

NBU 7 Volume Pools

Just curious as to what msot people use with regards to managing retention periods. I've read a couple of posts from people who recommend using the Netbackup Volume pool then just defining the retention period for each policy. Is this a best practice? Currently we have multiple pools that are based on retention periods, but I am running into challenges with our DSSU as it writes to a pool with a 21 day retention but I would like to add data that has different retention periods.

I would be interested to hear your opinions. Thanks.

 

Dan

 

NBU7 on W2K3

7.1.x and Earlier
Backup and Recovery
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  • Nicolai's avatar
    Nicolai
    15 years ago

    If there is no business need, I always go for a single volume pool and uses different retention's in that volume pool. No need to over complicate things. And in general fewer volume pool means more efficiency use of tape drives.

    my 0.02$

6 Replies

  • Nicolai's avatar
    Nicolai
    Moderator
    15 years ago

    If there is no business need, I always go for a single volume pool and uses different retention's in that volume pool. No need to over complicate things. And in general fewer volume pool means more efficiency use of tape drives.

    my 0.02$

  • J_H_Is_gone's avatar
    J_H_Is_gone
    Level 6
    15 years ago

    Actually the Pools do not have retention periods, it is the backup schedule that chooses a retention period for the backup image.

    Some people like to micro manage and set up pools based on day of the week, incr or fulls or in your case on retention period.  It just over complicates everything.  Use one volume pool if you can and let the policy do the retention and let NB expire items when it wants.

    You can create a new pool (that does not have a name that reference a retention period and change your policies to start using it, and as tapes expire they go back to scratch or you move them out of the pool.  Once all are expired remove the old pool and stop the confusion.

  • rizwan84tx's avatar
    rizwan84tx
    Level 6
    15 years ago

    Single Volume Pool with multiple retention is good, as long as images with multiple retention never write on same volume. By Default, NBU will not allow images with different retention to be written on same media.

  • pkjohnston's avatar
    pkjohnston
    Level 3
    15 years ago

    Pools are better used to define volume ownership and related charge-back (divisions, departments, workgroups, projects, ...) Perhaps easier for some to track and manage than billing against GBs backed up. Another approach for smaller shops would be to use pools to define what kind of backup data do you expect to find on the associated volumes (SQL_pool, Exchange_pool, FileShare_pool, UserPC_pool ...).

    That was good advice given earlier in this thread to try to keep the number of pools down, unless you have a huge scratch pool, otherwise you're bound to run into more error code 96s during your backups.