Vault Duplications running long time. NBU 6.0 MP3

[Samuel_Ayoub]

Has anyone experienced Vault Duplications running for days, when the entire Full backup only took (15) hrs? It appears to only affect my Full backups. Cumulative Incr backups appear to duplicate just fine. I have 2 profiles in the vault job. I've compared the settings in each Profile and can't find anything in either profile that stands out as a problem. Any help would be appreciated.

[DavidParker]

Samuel,
I had something similar happen, but it was for all duplication sessions. We never found out exactly what the cause was, but some of the factors seemed to include: network/DNS changes and high 'wait' states on disk activity on the master server. Eventually it just seemed to fix itself.

How long has your problem been occurring for? Has anything changes just before/since it started?

DP

[Samuel_Ayoub]

Hi David,

It first started happening shortly after upgrading from NBU 5.3 MP5 to NBU 6.0 MP2. After the upgrade, the duplication job would just hang at 5% for hours and then we would always have to cancel it to free up the drives (4 x lto2 in STK SL500) for the evening backups. I have spend countless hours with Veritas on this and was basically told by the Engineer that we are trying to duplicate too much data for only 2 x lto2 drives. He said that we need to add more tape drives in the mix and cited "More drives, more batches - the duplications are split into batches based on source tape so instead of streaming all the dupes to one drive, you can have more going at once". We currently don't have the backup window where we can afford to allocate all 4 drives to the duplication and I personally think the problem is bigger than that.

[DavidParker]

Hmm, yeah that does sound strange.
Ya know, I have noticed that Duplication jobs sometimes seem to 'hang' at certain percentages, but the job is actually processing (as long as you keep seeing Positioning messages it should be good) and it eventually makes a big jump in the percentage.
Have you ever let the Duplication job just go to see how long it would take?

I do have a suggestion as a possible workaround for you:
Have you considered using an in-line copy of your Full jobs instead of duplicating them later? If you've got enough drives for it, it'll save you from having to duplicate the tapes later.

$0.02

[Samuel_Ayoub]

we have considered it, but were hoping to get he dup's working correctly again. we may need to re-visit that idea.