Tape drives busy = Error

[MP230]

Hi,

we recently installed 2 IBM TS4300 (one in each Datacenter) with LTO7 drives an i am really satisfied with the performance and veeam integration.
Our main backup to disk window is during night time, at about 10AM tape jobs pick up new restore points and put them on tape. Allowed window for tape jobs is from 10AM to like 8PM. Since execution window for all tape jobs is the same, drives are of course busy from time to time, resulting in veeam spamming errors about it.

To me a drive busy event is not an error if the job is able to backup the new restore points in its defined time window or after a defined amount of retries.

Is there any way to work around this error generating behaviour?

Regards

MP

[Dima P.]

Hi MP,

Are you refering to errors in backup action logs or in email notifications? Thank you.

[MP230]

Hi Dima,

thx for responding. The jobs generate both, a job failed event and a notificiation (error) email for every retry. Jobs are scheduled for continuous. For example last morning a specific job was not able to grab a free drive so it logged the job as failed for 6 times (once every minute) then ran successfully. For every retry a email was sent out...

Greetz MP

[Dima P.]

Thanks! If you have multiple tape jobs scheduled to run at the same time you can try to use job chaining ( After this job option in tape job schedule). Configure tape jobs to run one after another and they wont fight for resources. Regarding email notifications – you can disable email notifications on warnings.

[MP230]

Hi Dima,

thx for the workaround, still a "drive is busy" event, to me is not worth a warning or error if the job is able to back up the desired data. It just makes the tape job handling more complex if i need to chain them, additionally the scheduling option for "as new backup files appear" is not usable... maybe consider that point as a future improvement.

Regards

MP

[Dima P.]

MP230,

I’ll take it to the tape team and we will discuss the drive is busy behavior based on your feedback. Thank you.

[Supraman]

Hello Guys,

I am having random tape job failure and this is stem from the drives being busy.

Currently our tape jobs are set to run right after their corresponding disk job and in our environment we only have 4 tape drives so when more than 4 job are running we are getting this weird failure where it indicated the tapes are all busy. I mean shouldn't the tape job wait for the tape drive to be free to continue rather than just flat out fail?

If someone could provide some insight as to why or what I can do to prevent this it would be greatly appreciated.