This morning I was checking my backups and saw that one of my backup jobs had completed, but was sitting on queue for verify and had been for 3 or 4 hours, which is longer than the job usually takes to complete in its entirety. Another separate job was running at the same time, but was using a different media set and, on the surface, a different drive in our library. We have 8 virtual tape drives (VLS1-8) and 4 physical LTO drives (MSL1-4).
In the job monitor, the backup job in queue had VLS 6 listed under the Device Name, but under the device tab there was no activity on that drive. In fact as I watched, another hourly job kicked off, used VLS 6, and completed successfully. The other job that I mentioned in the first paragraph was a duplicate job for another backup that had run earlier. Under the Device Name tab the job said it was using VLS 8, which under the device tab had not activity on it. However, VLS 1 was in use even though it was not listed in the job monitor at all.
I determined that the duplicate job was indeed using VLS 1 and MSL 4 (duplicating from one to the other) and the other job was waiting for that drive to become free even though in the job monitor it said it was using VLS 6 and there were 7 other free drives at the time. I waited for the duplicate job to finish and as soon as it did, the other, queued job started and completed, in the end taking about twice as long as usual because of waiting in queue.
Does anyone know why the job monitor would report the wrong device name on a job and why another backup job would wait for that drive to become free even when there are other drives available? We are using Backup Exec 11d with the latest service pack and all of our jobs are set to the library in general and not specific drives. Also, while I have noticed the mismatched job monitor device names before, I have not seen jobs in queue like this before.
Since this could pose a serious problem if several large jobs sat for hours and hours in queue, any advise or explanation would be extremely appreciated. Thank you.
