Re: [Veritas-bu] Reduce Volume Pools
Hi Ed and thank you for this. I agree that too many pools are overkill, and its not just SAP (that was only an example), but I am in the process of reducing everything down where possible. As far as I can see, there is no reason, and I am pleased you agree that mixed retentions is not good (as it is off by default). So "Yuk" is the correct terminology :-) Simon From: Ed Wilts [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Sunday, October 26, 2008 4:27 PM To: WEAVER, Simon (external) Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED]; veritas-bu@mailman.eng.auburn.edu Subject: Re: [Veritas-bu] Reduce Volume Pools On Tue, Oct 14, 2008 at 1:57 AM, WEAVER, Simon (external) <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: To give you an example, lets say I have 5 SAP Servers. Each one has a total of 3 Volume Pools (Offline Backups, Redo Log Backups and Online Backups). 5 x 3 = 15 Volume Pools. Yuck. No wonder you want to fix that. My aim was to reduce this down to say 3 pools (SAP OFFLINE, SAP ONLINE and SAP REDO). Any SAP systems presently known to NetBackup or future backups for SAP can use these pools. Thus, trying to help reduce the amount of tapes in use. You should attempt to reduce those three and combine them with all of the other backups. Do you really, really need to have physically separate tapes for your SAP backups versus your file system backups? In most environments, the answer is no. You don't even need a separate pool for online vs offline tapes - NetBackup knows if the tape is in the robot or not. We used to have separate pools by platform but don't even do that any more. The fewer pools you have, the more likely you are to fill tapes. Whatever you do, don't try to mix retentions on the same tape to reduce tape utilization. That could end up using a lot more tape in the long run rather than less (if 90% of the tape is incrementals and there's a 7-year backup on the same tape, then you can't reuse the space of those incrementals for 7 years). .../Ed This email (including any attachments) may contain confidential and/or privileged information or information otherwise protected from disclosure. If you are not the intended recipient, please notify the sender immediately, do not copy this message or any attachments and do not use it for any purpose or disclose its content to any person, but delete this message and any attachments from your system. Astrium disclaims any and all liability if this email transmission was virus corrupted, altered or falsified. - Astrium Limited, Registered in England and Wales No. 2449259 REGISTERED OFFICE:- Gunnels Wood Road, Stevenage, Hertfordshire, SG1 2AS, England___ Veritas-bu maillist - Veritas-bu@mailman.eng.auburn.edu http://mailman.eng.auburn.edu/mailman/listinfo/veritas-bu
Re: [Veritas-bu] Reduce Volume Pools
On Tue, Oct 14, 2008 at 1:57 AM, WEAVER, Simon (external) < [EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > To give you an example, lets say I have 5 SAP Servers. Each one has a > total of 3 Volume Pools (Offline Backups, Redo Log Backups and Online > Backups). 5 x 3 = 15 Volume Pools. Yuck. No wonder you want to fix that. > My aim was to reduce this down to say 3 pools (SAP OFFLINE, SAP ONLINE > and SAP REDO). Any SAP systems presently known to NetBackup or future > backups for SAP can use these pools. Thus, trying to help reduce the > amount of tapes in use. You should attempt to reduce those three and combine them with all of the other backups. Do you really, really need to have physically separate tapes for your SAP backups versus your file system backups? In most environments, the answer is no. You don't even need a separate pool for online vs offline tapes - NetBackup knows if the tape is in the robot or not. We used to have separate pools by platform but don't even do that any more. The fewer pools you have, the more likely you are to fill tapes. Whatever you do, don't try to mix retentions on the same tape to reduce tape utilization. That could end up using a lot more tape in the long run rather than less (if 90% of the tape is incrementals and there's a 7-year backup on the same tape, then you can't reuse the space of those incrementals for 7 years). .../Ed ___ Veritas-bu maillist - Veritas-bu@mailman.eng.auburn.edu http://mailman.eng.auburn.edu/mailman/listinfo/veritas-bu
Re: [Veritas-bu] Reduce Volume Pools
Hi bob
1st - Yes this is one of many I sent (well 2 were important, the others
were replied to help others out!)
Im not sure what you find hard to understand; At the moment, we have
alot of Volume Pools for different systems. My aim is to try to reduce
the number of pools, which will help reduce the amount of tapes used.
What I am seeing is tapes not being fully untilised, and I want to try
to cram as much Data as possible.
To give you an example, lets say I have 5 SAP Servers. Each one has a
total of 3 Volume Pools (Offline Backups, Redo Log Backups and Online
Backups). 5 x 3 = 15 Volume Pools.
My aim was to reduce this down to say 3 pools (SAP OFFLINE, SAP ONLINE
and SAP REDO). Any SAP systems presently known to NetBackup or future
backups for SAP can use these pools. Thus, trying to help reduce the
amount of tapes in use.
I could of course be completely wrong in the angle I am looking at;
Hence why I posted this out in the first place. :-) Of course this was
an example - But I just wanted to see if there was any pros or cons to
this.
One possible CON is that if a redo job is being backed up, and I then
need to restore data from the tape the backup is using, the job wont run
until the backup is completed. But I dont imagine that would happen all
the time. Plus I could freeze the media to prevent anything else writing
to it.
Hope this helps Bob. Appreciate any advice or opinions you have. As far
as I can see, there is no Technical Reason behind all these volume
pools.
Simon
-Original Message-
From: bob944 [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Sent: Tuesday, October 14, 2008 3:06 AM
To: veritas-bu@mailman.eng.auburn.edu
Cc: WEAVER, Simon (external)
Subject: RE: [Veritas-bu] Reduce Volume Pools
First, if this is one of the class of "I do not appear to have a reply
to any emails I have sent for the past 2 weeks :-(" emails, then, FYI, I
haven't seen any of them so perhaps you really have had an outbound mail
problem.
> > Quick question; I am attempting to reduce the amount of volume pools
> > that are in use for each policy we have.
> > I want to group them together, but one thing I noticed is that they
> > have different retentions.
> >
> > I used to think that was a big "no no", but could someone advise if
> > this is an issue in 5.1 MP5. I know the default is turned off.
> >
> > The aim of the excercise is to try to use the smallest number of
> > pools possible, and maximize the amount of data into the tapes, so
> > they get full. I kind of would like to fill the tapes as much as
> > poss
It's not at all clear to me what you are proposing. If it's using
"allow_multiple_retentions_per_media", then, yes, you would no longer
have, say, a separate tape from pool X with 2-week retention daily
incremental data and another pool X with three-month retention weekly
fulls and another with one-year-retention monthly fulls--they could all
be on the same tape if that tape were available when those backups ran.
But unless you have a toy robot that only holds five tapes, this is
usually a really bad idea. "Why" is left as an exercise for the reader.
The minimum number of pools to use is one, and that, IMO, should be your
(impractical) goal. Use NetBackup, or name it after your datacenter or
your cat, but only use additional pools if there's a good technical
reason to. A Unix pool and a Windows pool is not a good technical
reason. "onsite" and "offsite" to ensure, for example, that an
inline-tape-copy will produce separated data so that one tape can be
sent away, is.
Don't forget that multiple media servers don't write to each others'
tapes (except in 6.5, if you choose the option to allow it).
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Re: [Veritas-bu] Reduce Volume Pools
First, if this is one of the class of "I do not appear to have a reply
to any emails I have sent for the past 2 weeks :-(" emails, then, FYI, I
haven't seen any of them so perhaps you really have had an outbound mail
problem.
> > Quick question; I am attempting to reduce the amount of
> > volume pools that are in use for each policy we have.
> > I want to group them together, but one thing I noticed is
> > that they have different retentions.
> >
> > I used to think that was a big "no no", but could someone
> > advise if this is an issue in 5.1 MP5. I know the default
> > is turned off.
> >
> > The aim of the excercise is to try to use the smallest
> > number of pools possible, and maximize the amount of data
> > into the tapes, so they get full. I kind of would like to
> > fill the tapes as much as poss
It's not at all clear to me what you are proposing. If it's using
"allow_multiple_retentions_per_media", then, yes, you would no longer
have, say, a separate tape from pool X with 2-week retention daily
incremental data and another pool X with three-month retention weekly
fulls and another with one-year-retention monthly fulls--they could all
be on the same tape if that tape were available when those backups ran.
But unless you have a toy robot that only holds five tapes, this is
usually a really bad idea. "Why" is left as an exercise for the reader.
The minimum number of pools to use is one, and that, IMO, should be your
(impractical) goal. Use NetBackup, or name it after your datacenter or
your cat, but only use additional pools if there's a good technical
reason to. A Unix pool and a Windows pool is not a good technical
reason. "onsite" and "offsite" to ensure, for example, that an
inline-tape-copy will produce separated data so that one tape can be
sent away, is.
Don't forget that multiple media servers don't write to each others'
tapes (except in 6.5, if you choose the option to allow it).
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Re: [Veritas-bu] Reduce Volume Pools
Simon, this is a good plan. Don't worry about mixing retentions, NetBackup will not do that unless you have that option enabled (which you said you don't). Only caveat I would give is to pace yourself as much as you can. If you have a lot of volume pools, the initial grab on scratch will be pretty high and until your older volume pool tapes start expiring, you might put yourself in a situation where you use up all the scratch. Rusty Major, MCSE, BCFP, VCS ▪ Sr. Storage Engineer ▪ SunGard Availability Services ▪ 757 N. Eldridge Suite 200, Houston TX 77079 ▪ 281-584-4693 Keeping People and Information Connected® ▪ http://availability.sungard.com/ P Think before you print CONFIDENTIALITY: This e-mail (including any attachments) may contain confidential, proprietary and privileged information, and unauthorized disclosure or use is prohibited. If you received this e-mail in error, please notify the sender and delete this e-mail from your system. "WEAVER, Simon \(external\)" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent by: [EMAIL PROTECTED] 10/13/2008 08:46 AM To cc Subject [Veritas-bu] Reduce Volume Pools All Quick question; I am attempting to reduce the amount of volume pools that are in use for each policy we have. I want to group them together, but one thing I noticed is that they have different retentions. I used to think that was a big "no no", but could someone advise if this is an issue in 5.1 MP5. I know the default is turned off. The aim of the excercise is to try to use the smallest number of pools possible, and maximize the amount of data into the tapes, so they get full. I kind of would like to fill the tapes as much as poss Any feedback would greately be appreciated Thanks Simon This email (including any attachments) may contain confidential and/or privileged information or information otherwise protected from disclosure. If you are not the intended recipient, please notify the sender immediately, do not copy this message or any attachments and do not use it for any purpose or disclose its content to any person, but delete this message and any attachments from your system. Astrium disclaims any and all liability if this email transmission was virus corrupted, altered or falsified. - Astrium Limited, Registered in England and Wales No. 2449259 REGISTERED OFFICE:- Gunnels Wood Road, Stevenage, Hertfordshire, SG1 2AS, England ___ Veritas-bu maillist - Veritas-bu@mailman.eng.auburn.edu http://mailman.eng.auburn.edu/mailman/listinfo/veritas-bu ___ Veritas-bu maillist - Veritas-bu@mailman.eng.auburn.edu http://mailman.eng.auburn.edu/mailman/listinfo/veritas-bu
[Veritas-bu] Reduce Volume Pools
> All > > Quick question; I am attempting to reduce the amount of volume pools > that are in use for each policy we have. > I want to group them together, but one thing I noticed is that they > have different retentions. > > I used to think that was a big "no no", but could someone advise if > this is an issue in 5.1 MP5. I know the default is turned off. > > The aim of the excercise is to try to use the smallest number of pools > possible, and maximize the amount of data into the tapes, so they get > full. I kind of would like to fill the tapes as much as poss > > Any feedback would greately be appreciated > > Thanks > > Simon > This email (including any attachments) may contain confidential and/or privileged information or information otherwise protected from disclosure. If you are not the intended recipient, please notify the sender immediately, do not copy this message or any attachments and do not use it for any purpose or disclose its content to any person, but delete this message and any attachments from your system. Astrium disclaims any and all liability if this email transmission was virus corrupted, altered or falsified. - Astrium Limited, Registered in England and Wales No. 2449259 REGISTERED OFFICE:- Gunnels Wood Road, Stevenage, Hertfordshire, SG1 2AS, England___ Veritas-bu maillist - Veritas-bu@mailman.eng.auburn.edu http://mailman.eng.auburn.edu/mailman/listinfo/veritas-bu
