Disk Pool and maximum size recommendation

[larjona]

Hi

I'm configuring a NBU 7.6 master / media server on Windows 2012 R2 physical server.

I want to configure Advanced disk pool with some disk volumes. I need to know the best practice refers to the volume size. I plan a lot of 4 TB volumes to merge into one Disk Pool.

Is this a good practice?

Can I make volumes more bigger?

Best regards,

[revarooo]

I personally would rather have a few smaller Disk Pools than 1 large disk pool - why?

Redundancy.

In The Advanced Disk guide, there is no mention of maximum pool size.

[larjona]

Thanks revarooo.

All the volumes are stored in the same storage device.

[Marianne]

You may also want to have a good look at the data that you are backing up.
NBU will try to allocate backup to a disk in the pool where the entire backup image will fit.

PS:
Any reason why you choose Advanced disk over Dedupe?

[Nicolai]

I would go for one big pool to avoid micro management of small disk pools.

Ensure the disk are up to the work load. One good tool for testing that is IOmeter.

Netbackup can without problem handle very large disk pool - I have few disk pools of 150TB.

[revarooo]

Interesting difference of opinion. One physical disk then yes one pool.

Multiple disks, then I'd go for several pools, rather than pulling those disks in as one virtual disk and one pool

[sdo · Accepted solution]

I wouldn't worry only about the volume counts and volume sizes.

What you should also be worrying about is the disk IO payload size (NetBackup 'block/buffer' size) versus the underlying LUN make-up (and thus the total outstanding SCSI I/O queue depth) of the sub-components of the 'volume(s)', and any underlying parity-groups (RAID groups) configuration - and any 'multi-path' DSM configuration (e.g. round robin or least recently used, etc) - let alone the balancing of storage array front-end 'target' ports, and/or write-cache, and/or storage array back-end bus structure, and/or finally the spindle count.

And the relevancy of any of the above all depends upon how advanced the storage device is - and how much abstraction it offers you.

[Nicolai]

Seems to be one disk subsystem with 11TB of disk space according to the screen dump :)

[larjona]

What is the better option? Advanced Disk or Dedupe?

Which are the pros vs. cons?

Regards,