Mixed Drives Same Media

[Seth_E]

Hi all,

We had 2 LTO5 drives using LTO4 media and everything was working great!. We recently added 2 LTO4 Drives (Still using the same media) and things are not so great :) Drives are marked as down and they get stuck in "mounting status".

Must I use different cartridge types when using mixed drives (same medai)? Do I have to setup 2 robots? All drives are part of the same library.

Also, Netbackup goes to mount a tape and the library gui shows that it's mounted, but, Netbackup is still stuck on "Mounting ...". Than, the drive goes down and it tries another drive.  Please help. Thanks!

[revarooo]

Should work, can we see the output of tpconfig -d

Also what OS is this? Anything logged in system log?

What happens if you use robtest to mount a tape into the drive then run: vmoprcmd - does netbackup show the tape in the new drive/s ?

[Nicolai · Accepted solution]

Re-run Netbackup device configuration wizard.

I think the Netbackup order and the actual location in the robot may be mixed up.

[Seth_E]

OK, I will work on this tomorrow and get back to both of you. Thank you very much for your quick replies.

[Seth_E]

OK, so I deleted all drives, the robot and used the drives configuration wizard. I accepted all defaults and Netbackup setup one robot, and 4 drives but, split them as HCART and HCART2. I'm not sure which one is which (LTO4 / LTO5) so, I'll have to do some digging, but, seems one type won't work.  I was hoping to use the same media type across all drives.  Is this still possible?

[Seth_E]

New update.

When I go to inventory robot, it lists all the media (they are scratch) and shows them as type DLT, not HCART or HCART2. I will see if Netbackup will use all drives to mount these tapes.

[Seth_E]

Nicolai, once again you've helped! I used the wizard, but, combined both storage units into one using HCART and not HCART2. Seems when it was set to HCART2, there were tons of problems. Not sure why. Anyway, all is working.

[Marianne]

I realize that you have already marked a solution - just my 2c:

Netbackup .... split them as HCART and HCART2. I'm not sure which one is which (LTO4 / LTO5)

NBU default is hcart for LTO4 and hcart2 for LTO5.

NBU will not mount DLT tapes in hcart drives - in NBU, densities MUST match.
Because there are now 2 different drive types, NBU does not know which density to default media to, so it defaults to the robot type.
Even if all media is changed to hcart2, NBU will not mount hcart2 media in hcart drives, although the hardware supports it.

What was density of media before changes were made? 
It will be best to stay with the original density (probably hcart2?)  and also chance density of LTO4 drives to same density.

If you keep different densities for the 2 drive types, you will have to split media into hcart and hcart2 media. This will be difficult if all Barcode labels are in same range.
Easiest to keep all densities the same.

We had a customer some years back who had LTO2 and LTO3 drives, all using LTO2 tapes with all media and drives configured as hcart2. Worked well.
This was only changed once new LTO3 media was introduced.
 

[Seth_E]

Your explanation makes perfect sense. When I added the two new LTO5 drives, the media and drives were set to HCART2. Netbackup didn't like this. Upon changing everything to HCART, all appears to work well now.  I would have known this had I used the device configuration wizard.. :)

Thanks for updating me and I'll remember this for the future.