Scratch Media

[H_Sharma]

Hello Experts,

We have one tape that is going to expire today in the morning and its afternoon now. Still we could see kilobytes are there in media. Problem is DC in remote

place and we dont have media available for tonight....

1:- We have different pools. Rman is the only pool which have many tapes with differnet retention and its have many active tapes.

2:- We are not using multiple retention per media

3:- We have many active tapes in 1 month retention.

4:- Policies are with multiple retention.

Queries..

1:- Why netbackup did not expire the tape? Its still there?

2:- Can we expire it today? if we dont have media in scratch? Any issue with that manual expiration?

3:-  We have some media in Rman pool with diffenten kind of retentions? If backup fails with 96 error can we put other policies with rman pool?

      any issue with that?

[RiaanBadenhorst]

Post

nbemmcmd -listmedia -mediaid "XXX123"

Lets see what state the media is in.

[H_Sharma]

NBEMMCMD, Version: 7.6.0.1
====================================================================
Media GUID:                     a
Media ID:                       yxxxx
Partner:                        -
Media Type:                     HCART3
Volume Group:                   0_TLD
Application:                    Netbackup
Media Flags:                    1
Description:                    Added by Media Manager
Barcode:                        Txxxx
Partner Barcode:                --------
Last Write Host:                NETBKP
Created:                        05/19/2014 23:40
Time Assigned:                  12/10/2014 20:22
First Mount:                    07/10/2014 23:11
Last Mount:                     12/17/2014 18:02
Volume Expiration:              -
Data Expiration:                01/18/2015 11:02
Last Written:                   12/18/2014 11:02
Last Read:                      -
Robot Type:                     TLD
Robot Control Host:             NETBKP
Robot Number:                   0
Slot:                           58
Side/Face:                      -
Cleanings Remaining:            -
Number of Mounts:               89
Maximum Mounts Allowed:         0
Media Status:                   FULL MPX
Kilobytes:                      6407037716
Images:                         1121
Valid Images:                   1118
Retention Period:               3
Number of Restores:             0
Optical Header Size Bytes:      1024
Optical Sector Size Bytes:      0
Optical Partition Size Bytes:   0
Last Header Offset:             59275146
Adamm Guid:                     00000000
Rsm Guid:                       00000000
Origin Host:                    NONE
Master Host:                    NETBKP
Server Group:                   NO_SHARING_GROUP
Upgrade Conflicts Flag:
Pool Number:                    78
Volume Pool:                    1_Month
Previous Pool Name:             Scratch
Vault Flags:                    -
Vault Container:                -
Vault Name:                     -
Vault Slot:                     -
Session ID:                     -
Date Vaulted:                   -
Return Date:                    -
Media on Hold:                  0
====================================================================
Command completed successfully.

[RiaanBadenhorst]

You can release it with

vmquery -deassignbyid <media ID> <pool_num> 0x0

use vmpool to get the pool number matching "1_Month"

[Nicolai · Accepted solution]

Data Expiration:                01/18/2015 11:02

The last backup will expire today (my time zone) and then be recycle within 12 hours of that time. Out of the box Netbackup do recycle media every 12 hour.

You may want to reduce the number of volume pools and retention (if possible)  to get better media utilization. Sometimes those schema has been overengineered without taking in to account different retention and volume pool has a cost of reduce number of concurrent backups and partial full media.

[H_Sharma]

Hi Riaan,

What if i use.

bpexpdate -m MEDIA_ID -d 0

[H_Sharma]

Hi Nicoi,

I have made changes and made it 2 hours..... instead of 12 hours. I hope there is no issue on that.

[RiaanBadenhorst]

Should work as well.

[mph999]

When images expire, this is separate from the tape expiring, though it should happen more or less the same time.

bpmedialist -m <media I'd>

Should show the tape as expired, before NBU complete expires it fully.

For tapes in the expired state, you could use bpexpdate as you mention, or bptm -deassignempty

[Marianne]

2 days later and no solution to a seemingly 'urgent' issue...

Nicolai was right about Image Cleanup that runs every 12 hours.
Reducing this value may help, but I will not recommend this in a large or very busy environment.

As a workaround, you can use "bpexpdate -deassignempty" to deassign the expired medias (or "bpexpdate -deassignempty -force") when you are in urgent need of recycling expired media.

[mph999]

Opps, my error I meant bptm -delete_all_expired 

As a further note this only works if the tape is in an expired state, and you want to spped things up.  bptm runs this every 10 mins anyhow, so you wouldn;t have to wait long anyway.

[H_Sharma]

Hi Mark,

is this command bptm -delete_all_expired release the media to 0 bytes?

I could see that day tape got expired in the morning and still in the evening tape was not in scratch.

As you say bptm runs every 10 min so what might have happened on that day.. Any guess? 

[mph999]

Tape expire and Image expire are two separate events, they should be synced so that they happen with a few seconds or a couple of minutes of each other - so the image expiring does not necessarily mean the tape was expired, unless you saw it was in expired state with bpmedialist -m, so this could be one explanation, it was a bit of of stnc for some unknown reason.

The other possibility is that bptm isn't running delete_all_expired, or it isn't working - but I'd think this is unlikely.

[H_Sharma]

Hi Mark,

Same situation now. 3 media are there

 a:- one last write host was master server for tape 1

 b:-other two are 2 different media server for tape 2 & 3

Data expiration date is today and these are still not in scratch.

Bpmedialist shows.

 MPX   02/04/2015 21:31        N/A         EXPIRED FULL

1:- If I run from master server c:\Program Files\Veritas\NetBackup\bin\admincmd>bpexpdate -deassignempty -force
No media matching criteria were found to be deassigned.
no entity was found

2:- Pls let me know where should i run bptm delete_all_expired Master or media server?