What are the pros and cons of Enabling unretricted media sharing for all media servers?

[2540Lancaster]

We are in a Netbackup Enterprise  7.1 environment, we have enabled Unrestricted media sharing for all media servers, whenever we duplicate we have a lot of queued "Required media in use"  I am assuming it is because we have Untrestricted media sharing enabled.  We back up to a VTL.  I need to know what are the advantages and disadvantages of Unrestricted media sharing,   if we were to disabled Unrestricted media sharing what would be the advantages and disadvantages of this action??

[J_H_Is_gone]

I don't use media sharing, I have never had an instance where I could not do a restore because media was in use, unless I was  doing 2 different restores.

[2540Lancaster]

Thanks J, however  it does not explain the use of enabling media sharing, Does any other person want to contribute an explanation?

Thank you

[Nicolai · Accepted solution]

I don't think the issue is related to unrestricted media sharing. Media sharing enables a media server to look for free tapes across all media server instead for maintaining is own "private" pool. In environment with may media server not enabling media sharing will result in a huge amount of partial full medias.

Your'e issues is because the SLP is trying to duplicate backup images residing on the same tape, and since tape is not a random access media the SLP has to queue up.

[2540Lancaster]

Nicolai,  We are using both SLP and Vaulting for we have not converted all our Policies  to SLP, The issue we are encountering is the queued duplications from the vaulting process,  we have four media servers,  with media sharing,  Vaulting process is causing contention between tapes,  (I think this is the issue)

[cgoliver]

We have 3000 tapes and 24 media servers, which all share media and I would say the primary downside is managing the relationship established for the images.

The benefit is to maximize the use of tape.