Tag: VTL

TS7530 authentification failure

Christian Leave a comment

Today, I had a rather troublesome morning. Once I got to work, Nagios was already complaining about the lin_taped on one of our TSM servers, which apparently failed due to too many SCSI resets. Additionally, I can’t login using the VE console (I can login however using SSH) so I ended up opening up a IBM Electronic Service Call (ESC+).

Using SSH, I can get some information on the VE’s status:

After looking a bit deeper, it seems that none of the two TSM server is able to see the IBMchanger devices for the first VTL. The second is perfectly visible, just not the first. After putting both VE nodes into suspended failover, gathering support data for the IBM support from both VE’s and the Brocade SAN switches, apparently everything works again. I guess the library does have “self healing” properties.

Working with IBM’s Virtualization Engine Console

Christian Leave a comment

Recently, we got the recommendation from our system partner to use static allocated tape cartridges instead of dynamic allocated ones. Apparently using dynamic allocating cartridges comes with a performance penalty if more than a few nodes are backing up a large amount of data at once.

And yet again, I noticed that the IBM Virtualization Engine Console (aka Falconstor Software) is really error prone.

In order to change the allocation type, we had to shred the old cartridges first (500 x ~100M up till now), chance the allocation type at the virtual tape library level, and then recreate the 500 cartridges with a fixed size (500x 102400MB). Now, as I was kinda optimistic, I decided to create all 500 cartridges at once.

Failure during the initiation of 500 virtual catridges

So I ended up creating the 500 cartridges in steps of 45. Which isn’t that big of a deal. But, as we do have two separate logical virtual tape libraries (basically the whole TS7530 is partitioned into two tape libraries), we had to do it for the second one too. But I told myself “Come on, try the maximum amount again!” … And guess what:

Successful initiation of 510 virtual catridges

That worked ❓ Please, don’t ask me why the hell it’s working for one virtual tape library on the same system (well, different virtualization engine), but ain’t for the other one … 😯