Restricting VTL choice to DD SAN

Question

Hi guys,

Quick question, I have several RHEL6 servers on a Brocade fiber switch. They've got the storage node and client installed on each of them. Their fiber cards are zoned to our Data Domain. They've each got two virtual drives allocated to them, example:

scsidev@1.2.0:IBM ULTRIUM-TD3 8711|Tape, /dev/tape/by-id/scsi-1IBM_ULTRIUM-TD3_920868000B-nst

S/N: 920868000B

ATNN=IBM ULTRIUM-TD3 920868000B

scsidev@0.2.0:IBM ULTRIUM-TD3 8711|Tape, /dev/tape/by-id/scsi-1IBM_ULTRIUM-TD3_920868000C-nst

S/N: 920868000C

ATNN=IBM ULTRIUM-TD3 920868000C

Question 1, if I have a storage pool that contains all drives in all of these servers (if I had 10 servers I would have 20 drives), does this mean that if one server starts to fire up a backup, say server 1, and then can't get a local tape, since they're taken by something else, that server 1 could use server 2's tape drives?

Question 2, if this were to happen, would the flow of data then pass out of server 1, into server 2, and then through server 2's fiber channel to the Data Domain?

Question 3, if this does happen, in which way does the information flow from server 1 to 2? Network? Fiber? Is something definable somewhere?

Question 4, to avoid this situation, I've created individual pools for each server, does this make sense?

Sorry for the long winded-ness, I appreciate any input.

Cheers,

Jon

ble1 · Answer

You say they have two drives allocated each. Are these same drives or not. If same, this doesn't make much sense in days of VTL as you can create as many drives you want and avoid bottleneck sharing (DDS in NW world).

Now, if SN1 is using drives, then their exclusive lock is on SN1 so NS2 can't use what is already used by SN1. And vice versa. Flow is always local of course.

Individual pools do not make any sense - you just complicated your setup a bit more and unnecessary.

NetWorker

Restricting VTL choice to DD SAN

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