STK L700e IBM LTO1/2 Mix w/Netbackup 4.5

[yelhammar]

I've recently replaced an IBM LTO1 drive by an LTO 2 FC drive within an 8 drives STK L700e. all cdrives onnected to a brocade 3800 switch, Sun servers with JNI 6460 HBAs also connected to this switch.
Solaris/Netbackup has been re-configured to map the new Tape Drive, also updated Solaris st driver, and installed latest NBU patch for LTO2 support.
All the media on the L700 are hcart while LTO2 drive support hacart2 and hcart tapes.
the new LTO2 drive is downed by Netbackup because media write errors.
sgscan detects correctly all the drives. And also when I load manually a tape, i can run a backup/restore with tar without problem.

Thanks for ur help.

Yelhammar

 

[PGPhantom]

Check your tape/drive configuration. Both must be HCART, HCART2 or HCART3. You cannot mix and match.

 

[yelhammar]

You mean even if LTO2 tape drive support hacart tapes, it can not be mixed with LTO1 drives within the same library STK L700 ?

 

[PGPhantom]

No, not completely - You cannot ahve a tape created as an HCART tape loaded into a drive configured as HCART2. You can certainly have mixed drives but then the tapes should be in different pools so that it does not put a HCART tape into an HCART2 drive. The HCART and HCART2 designations are strictly for your benefit and they in no way determine capacity etc - BUT ... They do limit you if you cahnge things. What I mean is this - If you install an LTO2 drive and you did have LTO1 drives, set up the new drives at HCART and leave the tapes as is i.e. HCART

 

[yelhammar]

I've configures the LTO2 drive as hcart type within the storage unit, and also only have hcart medias on the library. But still can't use the new LTO2 drive.

 

[PGPhantom]

Are you getting a specific error? Is the drive downed? Have the services been stopped and restarted? Do the bpsched or bpbkar logs reveal anything in terms or errors?

 

[yelhammar]

I've run the following test:
For one storage unit, have downed all the LTO1 drive exept the new LTO2 drive to force a backup with this new drive. When a manual backup is strated, NBU loads the tape, then we see the a media write error, the tape is freezed, and it tries for a new tape until all the available tapes within the volume pool are tried, and get the error no media available.

 

[PGPhantom]

Did you remove and readd the devices?
Did you stop and restart all services?
What is your hardware configuration (Exactly) for the LTO2 drive?

 

[yelhammar]

1- Removed the old drive from all sharing storage unit
stop NBU daemon
2- replaced the drive and map it JNI EZ fiber with new WWN, and issue a reconfiguration reboot (boot -r). Also add the following lines to st.conf for lto2 support:
"IBM ULTRIUM-TD2", "IBM Ultrium-2", "CLASS_LTO2",
CLASS_LTO2 = 1,0x3B,0,0x45863d,2,0x40,0x42,1;

3- afer the reboot, I removed the sg driver (and /kernel/drv/sg.conf) and re-install it with sg.install for the configuration change to take effect: so can see the new drive while running sgscan tape: (new drive is /dev/rmt/5)

mob-archive@root[/]# sgscan tape
/dev/sg/c0t0l0: (/dev/rmt/0): "IBM ULTRIUM-TD1"
/dev/sg/c0t1l0: (/dev/rmt/1): "IBM ULTRIUM-TD1"
/dev/sg/c0t2l0: (/dev/rmt/2): "IBM ULTRIUM-TD1"
/dev/sg/c0t3l0: (/dev/rmt/3): "IBM ULTRIUM-TD1"
/dev/sg/c0t4l0: (/dev/rmt/4): "IBM ULTRIUM-TD1"
/dev/sg/c0t5l0: (/dev/rmt/5): "IBM ULTRIUM-TD2"
/dev/sg/c0t6l0: (/dev/rmt/6): "IBM ULTRIUM-TD1"
/dev/sg/c0t8l0: (/dev/rmt/7): "IBM ULTRIUM-TD1"

4- After starting the NBU processes, the storage units were reconfigured with the discovery/configuration wizard including the new LTO2 drive.

5- No special hardware configuration was done to LTO2 drive, all left to default.