Reservation of tape drives when all are in use

[Hermann_O]

Hello everyone,

I've got a general question about the behavior of tape drive reservations when there are no idle devices available.

We've got the following scenario:

All jobs are configured to use a pool of four tape drives.

Now four jobs are running and using all of them.

The fifth job is starting but can't run because there are no idle devices available.

What should normaly happen now:

Will this job reserve one drive and wait until it's free and start after the actual job (that is using this drive right now) finishes?

Or will the fifth job take the next available drive (should be like this in my opinion).

The problem is we've got often the situation one drive isn't doing anything for a long time while the other three are running all time.

So jobs are stucking in state "no idle devices available" and aren't running. When we change the configuration and say use drive xy (the free drive) then the job is running.

Thank you very much in advance!

Best regards

[Larry_Fine]

In my expereince & understanding, the answer is:

the fifth job take the next available drive (should be like this in my opinion).

Are you using CASO or any sort of shared environment?  Or a simple, single BE server with a dedicated library?  What tape library?

When feaible, I would suggest upgrading from BE 2012 to BE 15.