Multiple Client Instances in one Group

[gdc2001]

Ladies and Gents,

I need some help!!!

Can someone confirm to me that it is a Vert Bad Idea to have multiple instances of the same client in one group?

To explain, one group called "ALL" with 9 instances of client "Client 123" is it, all running differant savesets.

I could do with some answers, before I kill the Networker Admin who has set this up....

Many Thanks

 

[LGTObug]

Could you tell me the benefit of this idea? Why will you take one Client 9 times in the same group?
The only benefit i see is when a client has large Savesets, that you can split them into smaller ones. Indeed you don't need to add one Client per saveset.
You could add in the Clients-Resources one Saveset per line to split the max. capacity of the savesets.

The Client's only runs different Savesets if they were added in the Clients-Resource Saveset's Tab.

When all Clients got Saveset "All" what's by default, all 9 clients will backup the whole Filesystem.

 

[pmidds]

In the past we've split a server into two and put in different groups where amount of data was to much to do in one day.

ie

Monday - Server 1, Save Sets A & B.
Tuesday - Server 1, Save Sets C & D.

If they're in the same group it can't be for this reason. Maybe he thought it was you got parralelism to work ??

 

[Serbtastic]

This is a very bad idea! The reason for this is that as a client passes its data to the Networker server during a backup, it is also passing 'metadata' which consists of info on every file that is being backed up, and the client file index is being updated with this information. With multiple client instances, each is trying to write to the client index at the same time, causing contention for the index, and most likely corrupting it!

 

[jouell]

FYI, This is an ideal solution if you are doing oracle incremental backups, though I havent figured it out yet.

 

[Chapter11]

Serbtastic - it doesn't corrupt the client file indexes.

It isn't a really bad idea, the only time I use it is to break up extremely large sets of data that would otherwise take literally days to take a full backup.

I have one server that I have broken up into 20 different savesets. We did find that Networker only processes the first X number of items off the saveset list in the client definition, and I forget what the value of X was, so I cap my saveset definitions at 8 per client definition.

 

[speculos]

It can be usefull to have multiple instance of the same client if you want to keep different retentions for different savesets of the same client, because the browse/retention policy is located at the client level.

 

[rockyroad3333]

I cant see 20 clients instances for one server, how large is your server, i have apx 365 GB being backed up with two instances of client to apply different schedules\policies etc, and for recover perposes when i can run multiple recover per saveset.
However, just specify saveset per line in client resource, to split the large server data, creating more client resoruces can be a administrative nightmare.

 

[Serbtastic]

It can also corrupt the client file indexes.