Vaulting confused me.. please help

[jeorainc]

Hi all,

I am new to netbackup and recently I am implementing a 5230 appliance running at 2.6.0.1.

I am a bit confused with the "vaulting" feature. Pleas help.

Background: daily and weekly backup to MSDP. every week after a full backup to MSDP, I configured vaulting with deduplication and vault catalog (no eject) to a storage pool (e.g. Pool_week_1). So I got total 4 pools for 4 vaulting operation, once a week after the full backup to disk.

I got one tape library without any I/O slot (MAP in document I guess?). Total 48 slots inside and full of tape.

Everytime after vaulting, the tapes will be off-site to another location. Another batch of tapes within the same pool will insert to the slots.

The retention for the backup will be set to 3 months, for example.

I want to generate report for the off-site tapes. How to do so? there are reports for going off-site and going on-site, how can I define which tapes are off-site and which are on-site? Recently, if I ran a vault report, all reports shows nothing except the last report at the bottom of java admin console (I forgot the name atm..)

If, after 4 weeks the first batch of off-site tapes are back to the tape library again, but, the images inside are not yet expired, I want the duplication to continue on those tapes (assume still a lot of spaces on tape), how will the vaulting handle it?

I am just confused with this feature so my questions may be unclear..  any example or advice are appreciated in order to fulfill my requirement..

Objective:

once a week backup to tape

report to instruct users for tapes to off-site

report to instruct users for tapes to on-site

I guess I don't need 4 pools right? Just one pool is flexible enough in my opinion. Please advise.

[Mark_Solutions]

You do seem to have made complicated for yourself to be honest.

I/O ports (MAP) are ready useful things to have and I would reccomend reconfiguring your library in order to use them. How many you have may well depend on how many tapes you use per day or per week.

It does sound like a simple single vault profile would do the job for you but if you only run this once a week you will have a lot of duplications queued up to do each week

The majority of customers tend to use SLPs to do their duplications so that they are always up to date - you can then just run the media written report to see which tape need to be ejected

A really easy way to manage your media is to just go to the media - robots - tld(0) section, sort by time assigned and all of those that have a time assigned have been written to and should be ejected.

To decide which tapes can go back in the library go to the media section and look for any tapes that do not have a time assigned value and are not shown to be in a slot - any of those can come back on site and be put in the library

What you do not want to do is put one back in after a week while it still has a time assigned value as it will get apended to and will waste tape .. imagine you have a tape with 4TB of data written to it and 10MB of free space left on it .. if you put that back in the library an hour before it should expire it will write that last 10 MB to fill the tape but then cannot be reused until that new iamge has expired - a huge waste of tape space

Hope all this makes sense - have a good think about what you really need to do first and if you really need to use vault to do it

[jeorainc]

Thanks for your advice! let me response to your comment one by one.

1. I/O ports (MAP) is not an option on my tape library... 

2. The planned vaulting to tape operation will start on Sunday, to duplicate all client's full backup image done 1 day ago. This operation is tested and time required is more than 48 hours. So, we planned to off-site the tape on Thursday, which the vault operation should have completed.

3. We planned not to use the SLP as the size of data is hugh, which every single backup to tape operation may cause a lot of time and may effect other SLP as well.

4. For the scenario I mentioned above, I believe vaulting is the thing I want. Recently I just performed a vaulting to tape weekly for duplication only. But in the future those tapes will off-site and I noticed those "reporting" feature will be useful. At the moment I didn't make use of any of those reports.

Please advise how can I perform the above objective using vaulting. I believe this is a great feature, just because I have no experience in it and so I was confused...... thanks a lot for your opinion Mark_Solutions!

[Mark_Solutions]

OK - work through the vault guide then to get a feel for it

You probably just need one tape pool / vaukt profile that runs once a week and duplicates all backups done using a Full schedule? Make sure it goes back far enough days as if it fails and you re-run it it will miss images.

Select to skip eject part

The reports can be selected and setup within the vault profile as well as the properties of the vault and vault robot. If your selections are correct they should report on what you need

Tapes should be suspended during the vault to prevent their further use if they get put back in the library too soon

That is about it really

What make / model of library is it - dont remember seeing one without I/O ports

[jeorainc]

I am currently doing exactly the same as you mentioned: 1 vault profile, 1 volume pool,

For the vault profile I have setup duplication and vault catalog backup, but skipped eject action.

And the vaulting have been done 2 times in the past 2 weeks.

However, I still cannot see any vault report by clicking "run report" under the report menu.

And I am not clear how does it judge which tape are "off-site" and which are "on-site". My guess is new backup to tape are "off-site" and expired tape are "on-site"? If I take those tapes out, will they appear in the "off-site volume group" instead of the default "----" group? I didn't try this before and no chance to try recently.

When those expired on-site tapes are back to the tape drive, will they appear on the volume pool again and be overwritten by another vault action?

I have setup the "reporting" under vault properties and select all the report types as I want to know what are they before I leave office. I created a dummy vault schedule today for 1 small backup and I will see if I receive report tomorrow through mail. Will keep you posted. Thanks a lot!!

[Mark_Solutions]

If the report has already run it probably wont give you anything if you try and run it again

You need to setup the recipients and blat etc. so that it is mailed out or printed etc.

Look in your vault profile, reports tab to see where it should be saved, printed or mailed

Check in \program files\veritas\netbackup\vault\sessions\vaultname\ for the session ids so far and you may find the reports already created - but you need the properties etc setting up so that when the report runs it knows what to do with it

[jeorainc]

1. Under java admin console -> netbackup management -> reports -> vault reports, all report shows nothing except the last one called "non-vaulted images". I can see the images duplicated, but no media information.

2. My vault setting for test: only duplication, no catalog nor eject. duplication to a pool with 3 tapes inside called "test".

3. Under vault profile, I have selected all reports, and entered email address for it. I am using appliance as master server. But, I cannot receive any reports through email, and also cannot generate vault reports (see point 1 above).

4. I can find information under /usr/openv/netbackup/vault/sessions/ABC_Vault/sid14, with logs directory, eject.list and preview.list.

5. I just don't understand the standard of how it judge which tapes are "off-site" and which are "on-site". My assumption is below, please correct me if I was wrong. 
i. For duplication occur on tape, those are off-site tapes.
ii. If those off-site tapes are taken out from the library, they will be in "vault off-iste volume group"
iii. After those tapes expired, I can see them on the "vault on-site report".
iv. If those expired tapes are backed to the tape library, it will back to the "test" pool for vaulting.

[jeorainc]

Below is the only report I can generate... the "non-vaulted images" report.

Those backup are duplicated to tape.. but I don't understand why they are at "non-vaulted images" report.

I can see those backups from "Images on tape" report.

05/09/2014 Page: 1

Robot: TLD(0) Vault: ABC_Vault Profile: VaultProfile

Vendor: Symantec Session ID: 14

Non-vaulted Images

Images not in an off-site pool:

　

BACKUP ID POLICY

SCHEDULE CREATED

ABCDEFFTP00%20(Mall%20FTP%20Client) VMhost_ABCDEFvmw12

Differential-Inc 05/07/2014

ABCDEFFTP00%20(Mall%20FTP%20Client) VMhost_ABCDEFvmw13

Differential-Inc 05/07/2014

ABCDEFvmg00.ABC.com_1399433367 test_filelevel

test 05/07/2014

ABCDEFvmg00.ABC.com_1399433368 test_filelevel

test 05/07/2014

ABCDEFvmg00.ABC.com_1399439187 test_filelevel

test 05/07/2014a

ABCDEFvmg00.ABC.com_1399439188 test_filelevel

test 05/07/2014

ABCDEFvmg00.ABC.com_1399442312 test_filelevel

test 05/07/2014

ABCDEFvmg00.ABC.com_1399442313 test_filelevel

test 05/07/2014

========================================================================

Media that have not been ejected:

MEDIA SLOTID ASSIGNED EXPIRATION VOLUME POOL VOLUME GROUP

[Mark_Solutions]

Those are all backups from 7th May - so ones not vaulted - are you sure your profile goes back far enough?

Maybe show us screen shots of each tab of your vault profile and provide the main log from the session directory so that we can see what exactly takes place during your vault run (attach as files please - do not paste in the thread)

[jeorainc]

After a whole day try today at office, I can be able to get the reports now. Let me summarize...

1. should not skip eject, instead, choose "deferred eject". If I skip eject, no reports will be shown

2. perform a manual eject by right click the vault profile -> deferred eject. Then, the tapes are moved to "off-site volume group", waiting me to take them out manually

3. Under the volume group, I expired the tape. Then I use the robot to scan once (to simulate when the tapes are expired and back to the library), the tpaes are back to the robot's volume group (000_00000_TLD)

I wonder,

1. for point 3, if I scan once before expiring the tape, will the tapes remain inside "offsite volume group" ?

2. even I expired the tapes, the "media coming on-site" report still shows nothing. Should I run another vault report for it to generate the report?

3. What should I do if I move the tapes back to the library "before" it expire? And I want to start using them, any procedures such as unsuspending the tape?

I will continue to test next week.. just brainstorm for situations that will happen.

Thanks for your help Mark_Solutions