Just sharing some notes...
On a test system, I recently did a master/media server upgrade from NetBackup v7.7.3 to v8.1 (i.e. I didn't stop on the way via v8.0)... and I found that the disks hosting the MSDP data portion were quiet busy afterwards. As far as I could tell, the disks hosting the MSDP database were not excessively busy after the upgrade.
Normally on this test system I quieten down MSDP by doing:
crcontrol --compactoff
crcontrol --rebaseoff
crcontrol --crccheckoff
...and it is "--crccheckoff" which seems to help the most on this test system, because this appears to run 24x7.
N.B: I would *not* do the above on a production system.
Anyway, after the upgrade on this test system, and quietenning MSDP, the disks were still busy... and the spoold process was very busy indeed, such that spoold was driving my small RAID5 (5D-1P-1S) (of Hitachi SATA-II 7200rpm) parity group quiet hard, with a volume busy time of 100% and a disk queue length of 1.0 to 2.0.
So, I had a look at the crcontrol command, and in v8.1 (at least - maybe it's in v8.0 too - but I haven't had a chance to look yet) there were some new options:
crcontrol --help
...and what I found were some new "state" "on" "off" options for something named "dataconvert"...and I subsequently found (when it had completed) that this "data conversion" appears to be a one off event. After my upgrade from v7.7.3 to v8.1, I found that this data conversion took about 24 hours to complete for an MSDP pool of:
Catalog Logical Size=9.6TB
Space Allocated For Containers=2.9TB
Deduplication Ratio=3.3
I couldn't tell if this "dataconvert" phase somehow runs as a low priority in the background or whether it is/was self adjusting in demand based upon actual ongoing backup workload... so, I guess until someone else can confirm, then this forum post is simply about knowing that MSDP disks are busy after an upgrade to v8.1 (and maybe it happens for an upgrade to v8.0 too), and for probably quite some time afterwards too, if the MSDP pool is quite large.
During the "dataconvert" this command will give you a percentage complete, and when it finishes it will show:
$ crcontrol --dataconvertstate
***** Data Conversion *****
Status : Finished
