Unloading of tapes

[GAGET]

Our support staff is required daily to eject tapes to be taken off-site. When this occurs tapes may be in use that were used the previous night for backups and they can not eject the tapes.  This breaks our policy of tapes being taken off-site daily.

Currently out nightly jobs use a SLP thats writes to disk and then duplicates them to tape.  The duplications job can run at any time and I do not know of a way to schedule this to occur.  The nightly jobs are scheduled to run between 6 PM and 6 AM.  At 6 AM our SQL translogs policies start and run until 6 PM.

Is there a way to force NetBackup to use new tapes from a pool after a specific time of day?  I do not want to create pools for each day of the week as this archaic.

[watsons]

1) This may need some scheduling between you and the support staff. As soon as you get a copy of what tapes you want to eject, suspend those tapes one by one (or use a script):

bpmedia -suspend -m <mediaID>

This will prevent them from being picked up again when backup starts.

2) SLP does not have scheduling, you can only force SLP to wait before kicking off duplication by setting this file (create if not exist):

/usr/openv/netbackup/db/config/LIFECYCLE_PARAMETERS

Insert this line which tells SLP to force a duplication to start in 5 minute after a backup is done.

MAX_MINUTES_TIL_FORCE_SMALL_DUPLICATION_JOB 5

Note that this is not a scheduling, it's different concept after all.

3) Refer to point #1, just suspend those "used" tapes. The job would pick up new tapes then.

[Nicolai]

You can stop & resume the executing of SLP with the following commands:

nbstlutil -wait inactive -lifecycle SLP_NAME

nbstlutil  -wait active -lifecycle SLP_NAME

I do not know any "out of the box" method to force Netbackup to use new tapes at a specific time of day. But if SLP are stopped the chance of tapes being in use is reduced quite a lot.

[GAGET]

Would the Vualt product solve this issue?  It appears that the Vault policies do basically the same thing as the duplication jobs just writes them to a different pool.  I know I have over simplified this but I have never used Vault before.

[watsons · Accepted solution]

Vault has the ability to suspend tapes before eject them - so if you enable duplication, the duplication runs for your selected backup images, then it will proceed to catalog backup (if enabled), and only then trying to eject tapes (if you select immediate eject). Before eject, you can ask vault to suspend those tapes.

Vault works a bit differently from SLP, if your concern is the timing and want to be really sure when duplication and media suspend can be done, vault could be a good choice. Of course, evaulate first why you need SLP.