Random use of 4 robots

[David_Stephens]

I have 4 MSL5026 libraries, all fibre-attached. NB 5.1 MP3 running on Windows 2003 as the master and sole media server. NetBackup always uses device TLD(0) first, then TLD(1) only if (0) is in use. Devices (2) and (3) aren't getting much use at all, while (0) is getting worn out.
Is there any way to cause Device Manager to take a random approach to robot utilization?

[zippy]

David,


As far as I know it is random thing. Down the srive and try some more backups, see what happens. You can check the how your "storage unit configuration is" if you have it set to max number of drives set to on and you have your backup policy set to only use that particular storage group then all backups will go to that drive, as in the case of a NDMP backup configuration, only the NDMP server is allowed to use the its sole configured drive and storage unit.

Jim

[AKopel]

Probably the easiest, is to create more policies and point them all at different storage units. If you want some redundancy, create 4 storage unit groups, each with all 4 Storage units in them, but put a different STU at the top. Then assign each STUGroup to each of your 4 policies, that should do it... Or you could upgrade to 6.0 which has the ability to set the storage unit groups to "use least recently used storage unit" which works pretty slick for us. But I would recommend waiting a few MP versions because we have had quite a few growing pains with 6.0.....

[David_Stephens]

That's an excellent suggestion! I set up my groups yesterday and last night's backups ran just as I've been wanting.
I had not even considered setting up groups during my initial configuration last fall. Now I see their utility. I set up four groups, with a different ordering of the storage units within each one, and then pointed a few of my existing policies to use the groups with the least-used robots at the top of the list. (Actually, I only needed to set up a couple groups with the number 3 and 4 robots at the top; the default behaviour is the same as my Group1, but for consistency I set up four groups.) Worked like a charm, took maybe five minutes to configure.
Bravo for that recommendation!