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Narrybhatia's avatar
Narrybhatia
Level 4
9 years ago

Zoning of tape drives with Media Server

Hi, 

I have 4 Media servers and I want to zone my 13 tape drives with those media servers in SSO environment. Can anyone please guide me step by step procedusre to follow?

7.6
Backup and Recovery
NetBackup
Windows Server (2003-2008)
  • sdo's avatar
    sdo
    9 years ago

    Initial thoughts in the spreadsheet attached.

    .

    Notes:

    N1) Some servers have to serve four tape drives.  If the media servers have not been sized/scoped properly, they might not be able to actually achieve that.

    N2) If a server was lost, then are the remaining three servers even capable of efficiently serving the additional tape drives.

    N3) AFAIK, multi-pathing of tape is still not supported - so, a question to ask oneself is:   How does one manage re-configuring either zoning and/or opening ports and re-discovering tape drives in the event of any of these circumstances:

    - loss of entire fabric

    - loss of one server

    - loss of one path to one tape drive

    ...what I'm trying to do... is get you thinking... what you will see below is that we implement all required zones, but because we persistently disable one of the SAN switch ports facing each of the tape drives, then this effectively manages the 'visibility' and thus actual usage of teh tape drives.

    N4) Personally, I would implement all the zoning to support what might appear to be multi-pathing, but - N.B: - keep one of the paths to each tape drive down at all normal times by persistently disabling the SAN switch port facing the tape drive port which is not normally used.

    N5) You will control which tape drive ports are visible by either persistently enabling or persistently disabling specific SAN switch ports that face tape drives.  You will NOT be controlling which tape drive ports/paths are visible by enabling/disabling the SAN switch ports facing the media servers.

    N6) This initial thinking assumes that the Quantum i6000 IOSB modules will not be used as a kind of fencing gateway to tape paths.  If you do want to control tape drive 'visibility' from the Quantum i6000 itself then all my thinking in this first round is shot to pieces.

    N7) In the spreadsheet you will see a couple of 'blue' names/zones - these are the ones that were manually moved to balance the distribution of tape drives.

    N8) It's still not clear what models the tape drives are, thus... it may yet transpire that you simply do not have enough media server ports to fully serve 3, let alone 4, tape drives from any given media server.

    .

    Spreadsheet is here:   vvvVVVvvv

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  • sdo's avatar
    sdo
    Moderator
    9 years ago

    N9) In the sreadsheet use the filter at the top of column D to view just one fabric.

    N10) The top section of the sheet in column H, contains a countif crosscheck to detect if a WWPN appears in the list more than once.

    N11) I haven't yet marked the SAN switch ports which need to be persistently disabled to avoid multi-pathing... i.e. some SAN switch ports in fabric A, and also some in fabric B, will need to be persistently disabled - so that fabric A carries about half of the workload, and so that fabric B carries about half of the workload.  But we can add that later if and when you are able to answer the remaining as yet unanswered questions.

    N12) What you will see/find, is that seven tape drives are via fabric A, and six tape drives are via fabric B.

  • sdo's avatar
    sdo
    Moderator
    9 years ago

    N13) A word of caution:  (and I hope it's not negatively auspiscious that this is note number 13!)... The physical cabling decision is still very unresolved.  We need to determine exact SAN fibre switch models, because this can have a massive impact on cabling and port layout.  The terms to research are "port groups" and "over-subscription".  Until you can verify the models I would consider the physical cabling very much as pie in the sky.