On Tuesday, 11/12/2002 at 12:22 CST, "Gowans, Chuck" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: [snip] > We are not having good luck getting the Linux systems to boot when we have > tested the restore process here. We (thought we) understood the need to > have the Linux guest quiesced so we could get a clean dump - and as such > issued a 'sync' command hoping all of the buffers would be written to disk > form the affected guest(s). What (we think) is apparently happening is that > some level of VM caching is still keeping all of the data from getting > written when we expect it, or - even though it's late at night - there is > still some activity going on in the Linux OS that's corrupting the backups. > The IPLs fail at assorted points in the boot process. We are thinking that > we now may have to shut down the guests in order to get reliable backups.
The VM minidisk cache is probably getting in your way. Look at the CP SET MDCACHE command for ways to flush (or turn off) the cache after you have quieced Linux. You can do it on a volume or minidisk basis, depending on how you do your backups. Where 7x24x365 is required, you should already have load balancers/sprayers, etc. in place. Make sure your web/app server "clusters" have minidisks on different volumes so you can take down one server at a time, yet still maintain the service. Alan Altmark Sr. Software Engineer IBM z/VM Development
