Tapes & Pools

[choldings]

Is there a difference between moving a tape straight to a pool (incremental tapes for example) and moving a tape to the Free pool?

I see different behavior for each.

For example, I had jobs to tape waiting for a tape to use. I moved a tape straight to the Incremental pool. One of the many tape jobs instantly started writing to tape. I thought it was all set (the tape is large enough for all the jobs to complete). The next day I look and all the other jobs to tape were still waiting for tape. They don't seem to use the tape that was put in the pool, only the one job that was waiting ran to tape.

It seems like if I move the tape to the free pool, and let it grab the tape on its own, then all the jobs pending write to tape as expected.

Is this normal behavior?

[Dima P.]

Colin,

When you create custom media pool New Media Pool > "Tapes" you can find a checkbox under tape selector window: "Add tapes from Free media pool automatically when more tapes are required" If it is checked the media will be added automatically, if not - will be sitting and waiting for you manually to add tape media to custom media pool.

As Backup to tape job options – in case you set up to pick media from separate media pools for full and incremental backups make sure that the option described above is checked for both media pools.

I believe these options would describe your behavior completely – could you please double check it.

[choldings]

Colin,

When you create custom media pool New Media Pool > "Tapes" you can find a checkbox under tape selector window: "Add tapes from Free media pool automatically when more tapes are required" If it is checked the media will be added automatically, if not - will be sitting and waiting for you manually to add tape media to custom media pool.

As Backup to tape job options – in case you set up to pick media from separate media pools for full and incremental backups make sure that the option described above is checked for both media pools.

I believe these options would describe your behavior completely – could you please double check it.

We have the pools setup this way already. What I'm seeing is, if there are no tapes in the free pool and the jobs kick off, they wait for a tape. If I manually go to something like the Unrecognized pool and right click a tape and say move to Incremental pool, the first pending job writes to tape and the others don't. If I right click a tape and say move to free pool, then it grabs the tape from the free pool on its own and all the waiting jobs finish.

[veremin]

I’ve already asked QA team to take a look at this issue and see whether they can reproduce it. Providing this problem is confirmed, we will fix it in one of the future patches/releases. For now, kindly, place tape medias in “Free” media pool, so that, they will be used by each tape job, rather than by a single one.

Just to be sure – how your media sets are created? I assume you’re not creating media set per job session.

Thanks.