TSM 5.1.7.1 on Solaris 8 & 9 - Poor Performance 1

[TedM]

I don't know what your experience has been but we are having a ton of problems with TSM 5.1.7.1 on Solaris 8 & 9.
We have good performance after a reboot, but all server activity grinds to a snails pace after a couple of days. Our TSM domain that is on Solaris 9 crashes about every 2-3 days as well as running slow... So far Tivoli has not found any solutions for us other than the perennial, "You should upgrade to the latest code level." That's what got us into this mess! We were maintaining on TSM v4.2.2.7, but upgraded to be able to do library sharing and database exports. We have multiple PMRs opened in the past 2 months.

We have plenty of horspower... Solaris 9 is running on an F15K Sunfire partition with 8 processors and 16Gb(I think...) of memory allocated. The Solaris 8 instance is on a 6500 24x20 box dedicated to TSM only.

Anybody else had these issues? Is 5.2 the real answer?

PS: No problems at all with the 5.1.7.1 version on AIX...

 

[comtec17]

I had similar issues until I upgraded to 5.1.7.2. Be aware that by moving to 5.1.5.x you will need to have the latest Recommended Patches as well as drivers for tape.

 

[TedM]

Thanks comtec17!

Would it be worth our while to go ahead and jump straight to TSM v.5.2? IBM is leaning on us to do that, but we are currently not under mainatenance and management doesn't want to shell out the bucks. We are trying to leverage the upgrade based on NDMP file level restore capability that is touted for 5.2, but money is tight! Any experience with TSM and NDMP for NAS?

 

[comtec17]

Sure, 5.2 has some great enhancements. The only issue I have ran into with upgrading to 5.2 on our test systems is that the database requires 25% of the database size to be free. So if you have a 10GB database then you will need 2.5GB of free space on the DB.

 

[TedM]

Whoa! That's good to know about the database space requirements. If we upgrade to 5.2, I'm sure it will be across the board on all our servers. Currently, we have 5 TSM servers backing up the entire enterprise and the AIX box I mentioned above has a large database (106 Gb) with pretty high utilization numbers. I'll investigate further on this before we lay out any cash! Your posts have been very helpful! Thanks!