To me,
volume groups are all about location. Volume pool are all about
content.
Every
physical location, library, shelf, offsite, etc., has two volume groups, one for
LTO1 & the other for LTO2 (for whatever annoying reason, tapes within a
single VG must be the same type).
Volume
pools are about what data goes on the tape. Oracle data goes to one pool,
Filer data to another, NT, Unix FS, etc.
Now -
for offsite purposes, I create two tapes, one for onsite and the other for
offsite. The onsite & offsite backups are written to two different
tape pools. This makes the tapes that need to go offsite easy to
identify. I eject the tapes in the offsite pool (where there belong
to the VG for the library) and send them offsite. My offsite process
changes the Volume Group from "Library-hcart2" to "Offsite-hcart2". The
pool remains unchanged (couldn't change it if you wanted - NB fixes the pool
until the tape is empty).
I set
the return date of the tape at the same time - the same as the retention
period. When the tape is returned, it's fully expired of images & I
just stuff it back in the library. We have the good luck to keep all the
blank media in-library. If it wasn't, though, if you're volume groups are
accurate (and I have a gizmo to find discrepencies) then your
out-of-library-but-still-blank media is fairly easy to find - just find tapes in
the Scratch pool (or who are unassigned) and in the "Shelf" volume group &
inject them as needed.
HTH -
M
-----Original Message-----
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]On Behalf Of Martin, Jonathan (Contractor)
Sent: Thursday, December 15, 2005 12:23 PM
To: veritas-bu@mailman.eng.auburn.edu
Subject: [Veritas-bu] Volume PoolsI'm working on a transition on some of our sites from Backup Exec to Netbackup and I'm wondering about their use of Volume Pools. One of our sites uses volume pools as "buckets" for tapes they take offsite. Aka... a 3_mo_offsite VP and a 1_yr_offsite VP. Still others use the defaults... or some make up their own. The problem I am finding is that you constantly have to track which media needs to be reloaded or make sure you have a boat load of scratch media available just incase. Any better ideas on volume pools / how do you guys use them effectively?-Jonathan
