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Major Problem: Attached ATL not preseting to Win 2K servers

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30951m

Technical User
Sep 1, 2003
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We support a SAN with ATL M1500 tape libraries attached to an Inrange FC9000 switch. We backup all componenets using Veritas Netbackup Datacenter 4.5. We have lost all backup activity and out tape library and drives are no longer presenting themselves to the Master server (WIN2K Service Pack 3) device manager or registry. We do not have any apparent problems with the switch. Any suggestions? Has anyone experinced a similar issue? Our zoning is correct and the ATL WWN is presented to the switch.
 
Are the library and drives fibre connected or do they connect through a SCSI/Fibre bridge?
 
The library is connected to the switch by a fibre, this fibre connects to a fibre bridge router on the back of the library and is converted to SCSI to connect to the drives.
 
If you haven't IPL'd the library I would do so. I have had many issues with ATL and their SCSI/Fibre bridges.
 
We have Power cycled the ATL and backup server.
We have been advised that certain media can cause problems with the ATL but we have yet to check this.
 
Media will not cause your drives and library to go offline via the OS.

Does the ATL and the drives login to the fabric? I would check your switch and zoning along with the Nameserver logins. It sounds to me like your SCSI to fibre bridge went out. If I am not mistaked, I beleive that your bridge is a Prizm.
 
We have ruled out a problem with the ATL, we think we can trace the problem back to the HBA on our server, currently in talks with the suppliers.
 
We have an ATTO fibre bridge.
Finally identified that the FB was presenting two different versions of the WWN to the SAN enterprise manager, meaning that logical path wasn't there. We updated the firmware on the Fibre Bridge and this resolved the problem.
The biggest difficulty in this problem was identifying the issue across the SAN.
 
I have an ATL M-Seris Stacklink configuration with 10 SDLT320 drives. Brocade 3800. Windows 2K Master/Media and Media servers in a SAN. I'm running into problems backing up a NetApp filer running DOT 6.4.3p6. The SAN is port zoned so that both Win servers see all 10 drives plus the robot. The NetApp port is zoned to see 4 tape drives. Its connected via Dual port 2gbic HBA on the filer.
Orginal config only had 2 drives zoned for the NetApp. Due to growth, more tape drives were needed to attach to the filer. So I zoned another ATTO bridge to the NetApp zone. This worked for about 3 days using all 4 tape drives in the NetApp zone. Then the NetApp had 2 more shelves added, volumes were destroyed and recreated, snapmirrored to/from other filers, etc. This went on about 1 week. During this maintenance, I was not allowed to run backups due to lots of changes/snapmirroring, etc. Once they were done, I re-enabled the NDMP backups using Netbackup 4.5 FP4 and once the 3rd and 4th jobs started, it would down those drives, give status 83 messages. I disabled the first 2 drives, then the 3rd & 4th drives work, But when re-enabling the first 2 drives, the same errors occured. Today it seems to be worse. I can only get one drive to run at a time. Quantum suggested my zoning may be corrupted? They could not explain how to verify this so I rolled back to the 2 drive zone config but same issue. Sorry for the long explanation but figure I take a shot here since NetApp, Veritas and Quantum support have not been able to pinpoint the problem. NetApp requested Quantum to hook up a tape debugging tool to the drives to see what the tape drives are reporting at time of errors-this could take a week to ship that debug tool in. Also, this past week, 1 drive was replaced but due to the same errors. It did not resolve the issue. Any ideas? One thing I do suspect, do both the Windows servers need to see the 4 NDMP/Filer tape drives to function? Could this be a conflict? Other than the changes noted above, this was working. Thanks, much appreciated.
 
It sounds to me that your Device mappings might be off. Meaning what was once drive 1 might now be drive 2 and what was drive 2 might be drive 1. I would remove all the drives from Filer and re-add them one by one or 2x2.
 
Hmm...I've seen these symptoms with bad drive mappings so I have done a robtest and moved a tape to each drive and done the mt -f "drive#" status to verify the filer sees the drive. Deleting zones, Netbackup configs, etc were some of my next steps. I'll try that tonight or tomorrow. I asked my Brocade vendor whether both backup servers need to all drives including the ndmp drives and they said yes. I still have my suspicions about that, but it did work before...thank you.
 
Update: Yesterday afternoon I removed the media server zones from my Brocade config. That seemed to do the trick. I emailed my workaround to all parties involved to see if this is indeed the fix. As of now, only crickets chirping. If anyone out there can verify this is a good config, please post your comments. Thank you.
 
To: 30951m (TechnicalUser)/ComTec

What type of Atto bridge - FC310? I have that one and the FC420's. Still having issues with getting consistent tape backups. The issue today is two drives are being "downed' by Netbackup. Looking into upgrading the Brocade 3800 from v3.0.2j to the latest. Not sure what what version my bridges are running. I am also considering rezoning from port to wwn's. Since a bridge supports two drives per bridge, is there a way to configure the wwn zone by luns? Here is how I was thinking of configuring it:
zone: filer1 1,2; 20:00:00:10:86:10:14:3X
zone: filer2 1,3; 20:00:00:10:86:10:14:3X

on the filer NetApp uses storage aliasing of

storage alias st0 WWN[2:000:001086:10143x]
storage alias st1 WWN[2:000:001086:10143x]L1

I'm also looking into Disabling Probe setting on Brocade switch and increasing the R_A_TOV and E_D_TOV settings. Any advice would be appreciated. Thank you.
 
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