After upgrading to NB 7.0.1, media is not expiring and scratch pool is unchecked

[Yair]

Hi all,

O/S of our Master/Media is Windows 2003 64 bit,

i noticed in the last couple of days that something's been fishy with the way netbackup is dealing with expired images on tape.

today i found out that the scratch pool was unchecked as scratch pool,

and that the image cleanup is running but not expiring any images!

the image cleanup runs for a second or less than a second, and is not doing anything really.

so since the upgrade to 7.0.1 old tapes are not expiring and going back to scratch.

i found this eeb:

http://www.symantec.com/business/support/index?page=content&id=TECH138266

is this related to my issue? because i wasn't sure.

any help would be greatly appreciated.

or else i'd be forced to roll back to 7.0

[RiaanBadenhorst]

Did you happen to receive any errors when upgrading?

Check this technote and see if it matches your issues.

http://www.symantec.com/business/support/index?page=content&id=TECH130786

[RiaanBadenhorst]

Also,

did you peform the steps in this note before upgrade http://support.veritas.com/docs/340464?

R

[RiaanBadenhorst]

Sorry, thought you were upgrading from 6.x

I should read a bit more carefully....

[Yair]

No, i did not receive any errors while upgrading to 7.0.1, it went smoothly.

and i did not perform the steps you linked me to while upgrading.

EDIT:

No Problem, thanks for trying.

[Marianne · Accepted solution]

The eeb that you found seems very relevant. For confirmation, check bpdbm log to see if your master has similar entries. (If bpdbm log directory does not exist, create it and restart NBU).

For Scratch pool that is unchecked: hard-code Scratch Pool in vm.conf:

(install_path\Volmgr\vm.conf)

SCRATCH_POOL = pool_name

[Yair]

Thanks Marianne,

It's now hard-coded.

also i applied the EEB i mentioned in my first post and it looks like Image Cleanup is now running fine.

When will the tapes move to Scratch after image cleanup has ran?

because it did run but i still see those tapes in their old Volume pool and not in Scratch.

Unless they only move there if they need to be used?

[Marianne]

If all worked well before the upgrade - then I assume that all media originally came from Scratch (tapes will only return to Scratch if they were scratch before being moved by NBU to backup pool)? To be 100% sure, you can do 'vmquery -a -w' and redirect output to a file. Col 12 is the current pool name and col 14 the 'prev pool'.

I you have restarted NBU after hard-coding the scratch pool, double check scrath status with 'vmpool -listscratch'. Output from our own server:

>vmpool -listscratch
Scratch Pools
=============
Scratch

If you don't see your scratch pool in the output, you can either restart NBU or issue the cmd:

vmpool -set_scratch <pool_name>

Check again with 'vmpool -listscratch'.

To manually force deassign (which should return tapes to scratch), you can do the following from cmd:

bpexpdate -deassignempty -force

(all 'vm-' commands are in ...veritas\volmgr\bin folder; bpexpdate in ...\veritas\netbackup\bin\admincmd)

[Yair]

bpexpdate -deassignempty -force worked!

now i have 60+ tapes in the scratch, lol :).

Thank you so much, you've been really helpful.