NMC - What drives you crazy ?

Hi Skip,

been using NetWorker for a few years. Even prior to the 'new' NMC.

In our environment we are currently using NW 7.5.1, having recently upgraded from 7.3.3:

    NetWorker Management Console version 3.5.1.Build.269
    based on NetWorker version 7.5.1.Build.269

I do like the NMC console, especially the later versions, sort of.

When usung NW 7.3.3, I sneaked an NMC from NW 7.5 on to my desk, and got a whole lot extra benefits.

However, after our 7.5.1 upgrade there is one specific issue that I have (got a SR open to include this):

Under Devices/ Libraries/selected library, when I select 10 volumes, right click select inventory - tick "Force load and verify labels" - GO....

the system loads all the volumes into a single drive, and it takes ages.

Sometimes I will do this to 100 tapes, and I'll be waiting all day. I want to (have the option to) inventory 1000 volumes!

Previously on my 'sneaked' NMC, I could do the same, and it would spread the mounting across all available drives (24 in each library), hence the performance of this operation has gone backwards.

I realise that depending on what drives are clicked in the device pane, they can be selected from the "devices to use" list. Is it possible to make all available devices available for this action.

I also understand that consideration needs to be taken into other actions, like labeling tapes, due to drive restrictions with certain pools.

Also, NMC seems a little bloated (also better than previous, with more functions). Do you have any advice on performance, and resource utilisation, as I want to avoid NMC using resources on the NW server, that is already creaking under load. Much though I tell people to install the NMC on their desktop machine, I know people that will only use it when they TS onto the server!

Phil

Is the performance improved in version 7.5.1. I am thinking of just upgrading NMC now to 7.5.1 and the servers later.

What drives me crazy, PERFORMANCE.  Ever since we went to version 7.4.4 Build 650 it is vary slow. Opening a group window to check its status takes a lot longer than erlier verisions. By time the window opens you forgot what you were looking for. Many times I need to use nsrwatch and nsrjb or tail -f deamon.log to see what is going on, because if you wait for NMC to update the activity is over.

When creating a library using NMC you can not specify a name. NMC names the library its scsi path. This keeps the cumbersum jbconfig command neccessary. Fix this and we can finally not have to use jbconfig.

A nice to have that I would like to see envolves licensing. The license window is a nice list to see what licenses we have, but it would be helpful if it could show what server (or client) is using the license.

Sunman,

I'm jealous because you are not having to run NetWorker on Windows platform. Not fair!

Anyway, as for the performance in 7.5.1, I cannot say that it is better than 7.5 or 7.4.x versions of NMC.

Eariler I mentioned that some admins like to TS onto the NW server. I am considering removing the GST server from the NW server, and installing on a Storage Node that is less utilised, and forcing them not to log into the NW server.

However, can you explain whether you are using the NMC installed on your personal desktop, as that will send lots of info to/ from the GST database. Or are you using the NMC on a remote system, closer to the GST database.

I'm not sure if it the current version of NMC, but occasionally the NMC freezes and does not update - close and restart required. Case open with support, but they do not consider this high importance, so not expecting to be fixed soon. I have a copy of the latest NW 7.5.1.5 cumulative fix, which has a few pertinent fixes for our environment. It will take ~ a month to get through our internal process to put into production.

Phil

This makes sense, the NetWorker server that show the slowness each have over 550 client all feeding in on two GigE network connections per server. This is a major bottle neck. I have been working for a year with our network engineering group to improve this, but we are still 4 months away from getting the 10GigE backbone running.

When you say 50 clients, I assume you mean NMC clients not backup clients?

Good discussion !

NMC perfromance could be determined by multiple factors.

First one is, the data transferred to NMC is arriving from nsrjobsd. If nsrjobsd is too busy serving other requests, than a perfromance impact could be observed. We have changed the behavior in NetWorker 7.6 where NMC now recieves the information both from nsrd and nsrjobsd, we are seeing a substantial imporvement in NMC perfromance.

Other bottleneck would be the network itself, NW servers that are busy moving I/Os and acting as storage nodes are prioritizing the I/O movements over anything else. If the network link going to the server is saturated, NMC perfromance will decrease.

Other issues may include OS behavior, we have seen a strange Solaris 10/VxFS 5 errors that actually froze NMC/nsrwatch or any other stdout output for periods of 5-15 minutes randomly during the day.

As for sizing rules we can recommend only 2 rule of thumbs:

1. If you have more than 50 clients in the env. install NMC on a different machine (could be virtual)

2. Calcualte 256MB of memory for every 100 managed clients.

Regards,

Mickey

Hi Sunman,

50 backup clients We assume 3 client definitions per client which makes 150 client entries within NMC.

Thanks to Skip, with the new NW 7.6 we have a "find" and "sort" functions that will allow one to easily navigate to a specific client/comment/saveset/log entries all on a single screen...it looks amazing, can't wait for it to GA and hear feedback !!

Regards,

Mickey

Hi,

I'll bite....  

My list:

If I load 20 new tapes in to my loader, I have to set a label for them:  "a new tape"

which I then have to go mark as recyclable one tape at a time...

Perhaps there is a better way to do this, but I would like the option to:

     1) when labelling tapes in the gui, set the "recyclable" flag at label time

     2) Set multiple tapes at once as "recyclable"  (can be multi select, or a slot range, like when doing inventory)

Also, the default, out of the box install of nsr 751 server on solaris doesnt set up the GST backup correctly - I always see this error:

--- Unsuccessful Save Sets ---

* nsr-server:NMCASA:/gst_on_nsr-server/lgto_gst 1 retry attempted
  nsr-server:NMCASA:/gst_on_nsr-server/lgto_gst: No full backups of this save set were found 
               in the media database; performing a full backup
* nsr-server:NMCASA:/gst_on_nsr-server/lgto_gst savepsm.sh: Command not found

shouldnt this work out of the box without any tweaking?

thanks for asking !

Matt

Where do you get NW 7.6?  The latest I can find on PowerlInk is 7.5 SP1.

Hi,

NetWorker 7.6 will be Generaly Available in the late Novemeber timeframe.

Regards,

Mickey

Everyone,

  Before I forget. I have setup an email alias for all our customers to send me usability issues, suggestions, complaints etc. on anything to

do with NetWorker and usability. If you experience something in your day-to-day activities with NetWorker that you want to comment on

please use the alias to send it to me at: networker_usability@emc.com

  I can't promise all suggestions will be implemented but I can assure you that I read each and every email (along with others more powerful

than myself ). If we hear the same complaint from enough user we will get it fixed.

  In the past two releases of NetWorker/NMC, customer feedback and user testing have directly influenced the product. I will comment in more

detail when 7.6 is released.

Cheers,

Skip

Phil,

  Wow, that does sound annoying. I have a feeling this problem is shared by many customers. Let me

do some digging and see what I can find out. Stay tuned.

Thanks again,

Skip

Hi Skip we are currently using 7.4.4. NetWorker and we suffer from very slow response, our GUI constantly hangs and either needs to be killed using taskmgr or takes sometimes as long as 5-10 minutes top respond.

The amount of times we see the progress bar stopping on 46% is off the scale and our 24 x 7 Ops team have had to be given a script to run an NMC stop/start overnight because they are unable to monitor NetWorker overnight because it just hangs.

Is this improved in 7.5 or is it just something we have to live with for now?

Kind Regards

Pete

First let me explain my environment.I am running Networker 7.4.1. The Networker server is on an IBM p570 running AIX 6.1 and the NMC is on an Windows 2003 server. Why? you ask, because after about a month going through all the documentation and corresponding both through email and over the phone, with EMC I never could get the NMC to run on AIX (at that time it was 5.3). Since that nightmare I have not been in much of a hurry to upgrade.

Some other issues that I don't know if they have been addressed in later versions

Monitoring - I cannot monitor the whole backup such as how fast and how much has been backed up using the NMC. I must nsrwatch on the Networker server that I am not always logged into.

Group/client properties - If you select groups from configuration and select a group you must right click and select properties in the groups column, not in what comes up on the right side, to get to the group to set it up. You cannot double click it and what appears on the right is actually the client so if you double click it you bring up the client properties.

Local Hosts - I am guessing this comes from the client list but I have client only installed on most of the computers so I get an error when I click on them.