Ok thanks William,

And i uderstand that if target sessions and max sessions are set to 1 there would not be multiplexing... right?

Regards.

Within NetWorker you will always have multiplexed savesets unless you target sessions on a device is set to 1 and you never exceed the number of drives required for concurrent backups. If number of drives is exceeded then the remaining sessions will be round robined onto the drives which meet the criteria leading to multiplexing. By default you will have multiplexed savesets and without careful planning and scheduling it will not happen (and even then cannot be ruled out 100% unless server parallelism is very low).

Regards,

Bill Mason

Correct, as long as you do not start more backup sessions that allowed by having one to each tape drive. The target session limit is a soft limit and if you start more sessions they are added to the available drives round robin (one added to first, then next to second etc) until all the sessions are allocated up to server parallelism reached.

Regards,

Bill Mason

Thanks William,

I know all of that of round robin jobs between available devices but what i wanted to know if there is any flag to know if a saveset is multiplexed, but it seems there is not that kind of thing, as you said probably almost all jobs in a backup environment where target sessions and max paralelism are not set to 1 are multiplexing.

I consider this topic resolved.

Thanks again William,

Kind regards.

The only way to enforce no multiplexing is to set the device attribute 'max sessions' to 1.

tl

Yeah, i know that thanks tlemons.

All,

Just a couple of things on this thread which I would like to emphasise and another I just though of: -

1. Server, savegroup and client parallelism are hard limits - i.e. you will not be able to start more sessions than this is set to. Target sessions for device is a soft limit - it will be obeyed until there are no more devices to allocate. When this is the case and there are still outstanding sessions you can get more sessions allocated than this limit value.

2. If non multiplexed savesets is a mandatory business requirement for some reason, you could achieve this after the backup has been taken (with multiplexed saveset) but cloning the required group or savesets for a specific client. Cloning will always produce a non multiplexed continuous saveset on clone volume. So this could be a better option than trying to configure a backup to produce the same - it is very hard to configure this correctly and maintain going forward, unless your environment is small and not expected to grow much.

Regards,

Bill Mason

Ok William,

Thanks for the info.

I just wanted to know wich groups are multiplexing but as you told almost all NetWorker environments multiplex data, my case is not an exception, we have more than 800 clients registered and we have savegrps running 24/7. But just wanted to know if there is a way to know if a saveset is multiplexed, as you said we have the mediafile attribute, wich is usefull for my needs, so i think this topic is resolved.

Again thanks William and kind regards.