Legato Backup server tunning

[pvenkat14]

We are running Legato Networker on Windows 2000 server and and i want to know what important configuration files which we have look into to tune legato networker.
The important isse we are having is the tapes are shoe shining which implies that the buffers are not staying full.

Please advice.

Thanks and Regards
Venkat

 

[605]

Do you really expect any valuable output providing no input at all??? - Tuning is a very complex issue in general - as it depends on a lot of issues, there is no straight way.

For instance, if you cannot stream 4 LTO-3s on your NW server at a time. you most likely can not get enough data from your clients. If you cannot stream 4 DLTs on the same system, i expect a hardware problem. Just to use ONE VERY easy configuration.

To start with, i recommend to read the Performance Tuning Guide which you get from Powerlink. Then use bigasm to see whether your tape drives can stream at all. If this is possible, then you can not get data fast enough ... and so on.

 

[pvenkat14]

Thanks a lot for your reply i am very new to legato I have experience on other network backup softwares like HP Data protector and veritas netbackup but not on legato so.....please see more details below..

Here is the rough picture of an existing environment

1. Legato Networker backup server running on Windows Server 2000.
2. Backing up direct attached storage from 3 physical servers.
3. Backup up SAN attached storage from ~15 virtual servers spread across 5 ESX servers.
4. Backups are done across the LAN.
5. Writing to Quantum M1500 tape library with two LTO tape drives and 20 tape slots.

The goals are the following:

1. Look at the Legato Networker setup to see if there are any gross miss-configurations.
2. Documeneted steps for daily maitainance.
3. Important files to look for configuration changes for fine tunning
4. Analyzing and determining why backups are slow (tapes are shoe shining which implies that the buffers are not staying full).
Can you please help with the above tasks i need rough idea which files need to be checked.

I really appreciate your help and time in assisting me.

Thanks and Regards
Venkat

 

[605]

Believe me - the last you have to tune is NetWorker. The only values which my help is the block size. And this is not setup via files but device configuration parameters. However, my own tests showed that the results show marginal differences. But first of all, you must ensure that Windows allows block sizes > 64KB - this is not a NW issue. The manual i mentioned will help you.

Also, look for "bigasm" and find out whether you can keep your drives streaming in general. If this is not the case, you are stuck already.

With respect to shoeshining, it is important to find out
- with which backup it will occur (local & remote)
- whether you backup a few big or a number of small files
- Even if you run local backups, make sure that the network link to the server is fast enough.


BTW - these are general issues, they do not just apply to a specific backup software.