Number of media Servers for an SSO license

[gopi_enovate]

Hi,
      Is there a limit for number of media servers being used for sharing tape drives?

We are trying to add a new media server to the existing environment. Currently, tape drives are shared betweeen servers 1 and 2.
Server 3 is added to the environment and all neccessary licenses(including SSO) are added.

We are able to share the tape drives only between two servers. If we try to add server 3, server 1 disconnects and only two paths are shown at any point in time.

However tpconfig -d or vmoprcmd -d is showing all the tape drives on all 3 servers.

NB admin console is not showing the third path which was configured. Duplication jobs get failed if server 1 is removed.

Is there a limit for the license set?

[Pangal]

service restart is required after adding license on media server,  in our environment drives were shared by more than two media servers .

[sdo]

SSO is licensed by drive count, and not by media server count.

SSO does not check media server count.

It would seem that your issue is not a licensing issue.

There used to be a hard limit of a total of 128 (or maybe it was 256) SSO tape drive paths.  And I seem to remember recommendations not to go above 128.  i.e. the hard limit may have been, and maybe it still is, 256, but the recommendation was not to go above 128.

So, if you have four servers and five drives, then that's 20 SSO paths.

.

First you need to confirm that all SSO serialised drives are visible to all SSO servers - by this I mean... on all of the servers that you expect to see the required drives, do all servers report the desired drive count - AND the same tape drive serial numbers?   Use the 'scan' command to check. 

[sdo]

Good point.

Is the SSO license key (or a key which includes the SSO feature) installed on all SSO sharing servers?

bpminlicense -list_keys -verbose

[gopi_enovate]

Yes, it is.
Three servers are being showed in the device montior but only two at a time.

[gopi_enovate]

Device manager service was restarted on all three servers.

[gopi_enovate]

It does report all shared tape drives in all three servers.
scan -tape is showing 5 tape drives in all three servers,

[sdo]

Maybe restarting ltid (NetBackup Device Manager) is not enough to convince NetBackup that it has all the required licences.

Unfortunately there are several (if not many) configuration options within NetBackup where it's not clear - even to semi-experienced admins - which ones require re-starting of which modules - well not to me anyway.

One trick which used to sometimes make NetBackup reload certain configuration items is, on the master to issue:

bprdreq -rereadconfig

...but I think your problem may be to do with EMM requiring a reload.  In which case a restart of NetBackup on the master server could be what you need to do.

But let's wait and see if anyone else knows how to force NetBackup to reload/reacquire/reassess its licensing position.

[sdo · Accepted solution]

As a quick confirmation... you could run this 'query / report / show' type command on all three servers:

tpautoconf -report_disc

...which means 'report discrepency'.

This particular command is safe to run, in that it will not modify anything.  What is does is compare 'scan' to the device configuration reported by tpconfig (which is actually stored within the EMM) - and reports any dicsrepencies between the two.

If nothing is reported/shown/listed then this is usually (but not always) a good sign - in that it means that tpconfig is consistent with scan.

N.B: Do not be tempted to run other 'tpautoconf' commands unless you know what you are doing.  Some/most of the other switches/options on tpautoconf will make changes to your device configuration - which might be a bad thing to do right now.

[gopi_enovate]

It didnt report discrepancies.
Restarted the services in the master server which fixed the issue.

Device attached to master/media server was missing paths to the originally connected devices.

Drive paths were edited and services restart fixed the issue.

Three media servers are sharing the tape drives as required.

Thanks everyone for your replies.

[sdo]

So... Pangal was correct, first time.  :)       Solution points deserved?  Yes.