Tape Library issue, Catridge show frozen

Dear Marianne,

How to unfreeze the tape?

And I had scheduled a manuall backup which needs to be done in high priority, when I start the manual backup (With Priority 10) in Activity Monitor it shows, Queued (Required Media in use), even I tried to stop all the active backup but this is not sarting.

I had reboot the TL, now all the drives are up and shows TLD, there is no backup running now. But when I tried to start the manual backup it still shows Required media is in use (backupservername - hcart2-robot-tld-0)

Kindly advice me in this.

Only you can investigate as you have the NBU console open.
Does it say in Details tab which media-id is needed?

Can you see in other Active jobs if this tape is really in use?

Which media-id's are mounted in the tape drives (check Device Monitor).?

Check output of available_media report to see if another tape is available - unassigned or not full and in the same pool (as required by the policy) and same retention level.

Dear Marianne,

I have created a policy name as test and created a pool name as test and assigned a tape (available) to the test pool. When I run the backup manually i'm getting Required media is in use (backupservername - hcart2-robot-tld-0), after some times it changes to Drivers are in use in storage unit.

I have 4 drives, only 3 is active right now.

In the details tab there it havent mentioned any media-id.

It seems as if the library issues have caused 'orphaned' resource allocations.

Unfortunately, experience has taught us that the only solution is to clear all resource allocations.
This means that running backups will fail.

If you can, try to suspend all running backups and then reset resource allocations:

nbrbutil -resetall

PS:

Did you stop all backups and waited for drives to be unloaded before you rebooted the tape library?
There might be a tape stuck in the drive that is now not used.

Dear Marianne,

Sorry for confusion, in my Netbackup console Volume Pools shows the total quanitity of catridge is 66, but my library is 45 slots TL.

Which means I have compare the TL GUI and Netbackup GUI and find the available tape and if I assign that tape to test pool it may work?

Is my understanding is right?

Not all tapes added to NBU over time are neccesarily in the robot.

Tapes in the robot will show up as TLD and tapes not in the robot as NONE.

Have you tried available_media report as suggested earlier?
(Run from cmd in ...NetBackup\bin\goodies).

Redirect to a .txt file for easy reading, e.g.
C:\Program Files\Veritas\NetBackup\bin > available_media > C:\Temp\media.txt
(Create Temp folder or specify another folder that exists)

I missed this question:

..... advice me how frequent drive cleaning has to be performed.

Frequency-based drive cleaning is not adviced.

All tape drives these days support TapeAlert.
This is the drive firmware sending alerts to the OS and backup software. 

There are 2 ways to configure automatic cleaning:

1. Robot Cleaning
   This depends on make/model tape library and if the robot has special maintenance slot for cleaning tapes.
   Here the robot will pick up the TapeAlert for cleaning and mount a cleaning tape before a backup tape is mounted.
2. NetBackup cleaning
   You add cleaning tapes to the NONE pool with media type (density) as Cleaning tape that matches the drive/media density.
   NBU will pick up the TapeAlert and mount a cleaning when needed.

Some TNs:

How NetBackup TapeAlert works 
http://www.veritas.com/docs/000076337  

How to configure NetBackup to use "tapealert" for drive cleaning  
http://www.veritas.com/docs/000016344 

Best practices: NetBackup tape drive cleaning 
http://www.veritas.com/docs/000076336