How to put a tape drive down for maintenance in NBU

[Tijs]

Hi Guys,

Does someone know how to put a tape drive down for maintenance in Netbackup?

There are still jobs running and there is a tape mounted on that drive?

For example in Networker you can specify a tape drive to put out of service, this command will complete the running job, unmounts the tape and put the drive down.

But in Netbackup there is I think no way to do this, you can kill all the jobs but we would like to avoid this...

Thx!

best regards,

Tijs

[RamNagalla]

you can have a try of vmoprcmd -down <driveindexid>

I am not sure, if that helps, but worth trying..

<<,EIDT>>>

i just verifed that command its not making down.. so no way..

<<EDIT END>>>

if this does not work, only why I am seeing is cancle or suspend the job, and make it down.

[Marianne]

Drive currently in use by NBU cannot be DOWN'ed.

You need to wait for job to complete, or else suspend/cancel the job before DOWN'ing it (GUI or cmd).

[sksujeet · Accepted solution]

When you are putting something in maintenace you already  know the timings. Not a good practise to eject or stop the tape drive in the middle of backup as it might corrupt the tape.

Also it would be better to cancel the job and wait for some time till it unloads the tape from the drive and make the drive down from GUI or command.

[Tijs]

It's really a pain in the ass to stop all the jobs that uses that tapedrive and restart them afterwards again. Why isn't there an option to place a tape drive out of service after his job has finished...

Thank you all for the answers!

[RamNagalla]

may be its because of netbackup inteligence, Netbackup do identifies that tape Drives  if they are out of services, and make then down automatically.

any maintace activities should comeup with the plan, as suggest by SAZZ.

if you still feel that , its worth having this feature, you can submit your idea.

https://www-secure.symantec.com/connect/backup-and-recovery/ideas

[RamNagalla]

i just got an idea.

if you are looking for all the drives to be down, for a particular media server.

just identify the Storage units for that media server, and keep max concurent drives as 0.

only active jobs will get compleate, no other jobs will get assing to that drives.

having the Drive ideal or down would be same result for maintace.

[J_MCCOLL]

Changing the settings of Max concurrent drives will only work if you restart the VM services. 

If you wish to DOWN the drive use the vmoprcmd command along with shutting down BPRD service.

Process:

1. Stop the BPRD service on the MASTER (will stop all further jobs from being sent to the Job Queue)
2. All current and queued jobs will continue to run
3. When the drive is no longer in use run the VMOPRCMD command to DOWN the drive
4. When you have the drive in a DOWN state you can restart the BPRD service
5. When the BPRD service is restarted I believe that the jobs that had not ran will be queued and processed

This is messy solution, you should really schedule a proper maintenance window and have a system outage.

[RamNagalla]

its NBPEM which would stop the future schedule jobs.

stoping bprd would stop the manual backup, restore and client iniciated backups.

[J_MCCOLL]

Nagalla, you are right...

To suspend scheduling, issue the following command:

nbpemreq -suspend_scheduling

To resume scheduling, issue the following command:
nbpemreq -resume_scheduling

The above commands should be used to in step 1 and step 4 respectively...

Other than this, the steps advised previously are correct and will allow you to perform this maintenance.

I would stress though that it is not a best practice.

[Tijs]

Hi Nagalla,

That's a good tip that you gave...the best thing is first suspend the scheduling then cancel the backup job and put the drive down...
Thx!
 

Thank you all for your responses!

Best regards,
Tijs

[jim_dalton]

...and you can suspend an awful lot of jobs too as mvdb hinted, though some types you cant, so I guess you stop the scheduler as per jmcoll, suspend everything you can,terminate whats left, down the drive, and so forth. Not tried it, but seems reasonable.

Jim