Shared Tape drives

[Yuvi]

In Our environment , we have one master server acting as media server also and two san media server and another sepaertae media server ( B).

Master servers and Media Servers : Windows 2008 R2 64bit 

San Media Server : Linux OS

And one IBM L3 library drive with 12 drives and all the 12 drives are shared for Master server and San media servers.

And only two drives for Server B and if i need to use the two drives sexplicitely  for the server B i need zoning change or i can down aother paths except B paths alone for the drives.

[Yuvi]

Any suggestions.

[Yasuhisa_Ishika]

you don't need to change zoning - just down(or remove) path of other servers.

[RamNagalla]

Yuvi,

are you saying only 2 drives are configured for Media server B?

if that is the case, you can use then with out any issues.. you just have to make sure that the storage unit for media server B has max concurent drives as 2.

if that is not the case... all 12 drives are connected and configured to Media server B and you only wnat to use only 2 dirives

1)use can keep Max conncurent drives as 2 in STU to make use of any 2 avaliable drives out of 12

2)if you sepcfifically use only 2 , then just keep only 2 in media server conifgureation and remove another drives from netbackup using tpconfig..

hope this helps.. 

[RLeon]

If server B's 2 private drives are also already zoned to the other servers, then the easiest way without having to change zoning would be to disable the drive paths to the other servers inside Netbackup, as Yasuhisa suggested.
I.e., each of the 2 drives would initially have 4 paths to 4 different servers. Disable the other 3 paths so that each drive only has 1 path to server B.
You can delete individual drive paths from the Nbu admin console via Media and Device Management > Devices > Drives.

A similar method to the above which also does not require editing zones would be to use the HBA software on the servers to apply lun masking on the drive luns. (E.g., using Qlogic's SANsurfer or Emulex's OCM)
Once a drive lun is masked on a server, it will not see the drive, and Netbacukp will not see a path from this server to the drive. So do this on the servers other than server B.

A "cleaner" way would be to remove the zones from those 2 drives to the other 3 servers, so that they are only zoned to server B.

The result of all these would be that, even when server B is not using those 2 drives (for backup or restore), the other 3 servers would still not be able to use them because they do not have paths to these 2 drives.
The 3 servers would only be able to use up to a total of 10 drives, no matter how busy they get.
For server B, the benefit is that no matter how busy the other 3 servers get, there will always be 2 freely available private drives to use whenever needed.

Giggity.

[mph999 · Accepted solution]

What I believe is the correct way, is to change the zoning and remove the drives from the servers that don't need to use them.

Other methods mentioned such as removing the drives from the config are more workarounds than solutions.

Why ?

It gets very confusing when you come across a system that has unconfigured.  Perhaps the usual admin is away and a colleague who is not familiar is looking after things - you can see how difficult things can become, as he may think all the drives should be in use, and so config changes against your wishes are made.

If you were building this system from scratch, then you would only zone the drives to the servers that need them.  If the machines now don't need the drives, the drives should be unzoned.

Also, if the drives are visible to macines that are not using them, you increase the possibility of issues with scsi reservation problems, yes, I know this shouldn't happen, but it does, and is easily avoided by only having the drives on the machines that need them.

Martin