EML library and Veritas Net backup

[Vladimir Fabecic]

Hello
Excuse me for this question, but I am new in HP-UX.
Situation: There is a HP EML103E connected to fibre channel. It will be used for Veritas Net backup server which has to be installed on HP-UX machine (HP 9000).
How HP-UX has to be prepared for backup software installation?
What do I have to check and test to be be sure everithing is set OK for Veritas installation?
What device files has to be created for tapes and changer?
Is there something simular to TRU64 MRU robot software for HP-UX?
Thanks.

[Peter Godron]

Vladimir,
altough I only help out with NetBackup problems, I have almost always found the info I needed at:
http://seer.support.veritas.com/

Good Luck.

[AshishJain_USA]

Hi

I havn't ever used an HP Library. However, the steps for using any Tape Library on an HPUX system would be

1. Attach the Tape Library to your server ( Direct or through your SAN environment ).
2. Do an ioscan and insf -e
3. Install the robot / drive changer driver
4. Install any Tape drive specific drivers.

Once these are done, you may use the Netbackup Activity monitor or Veritas commands to configure the Robot and the drives and yes..... you may always look for support.veritas.com

rgds...Ashish

[Vladimir Fabecic]

Hello
I know that I have to attach library to SAN and configure NSR and zoning. No problem with that part. Also know that I have to do ioscan and insf -e ("ioscan -fnC tape" and "ioscan -fnC autoch") to see if server recognized library.
But how will I know if specific drivers for tape and changer are needed.
Do I have to install special drivers from HP or from Veritas.
Some links to documentation will be very helping.

[AshishJain_USA]

Hi

You will need to install drivers specific to yr Tape Library for HPUX OS. The Library docs will provide you the best documentation.

rgds
Ashish

[Vladimir Fabecic]

I have been looking for drivers on HP web site. All I have found for HP-UX are diagnostic and firmware bundle.

[Steve Lewis]

Netbackup simply uses the sctl driver for the robot arm and the stape driver for the drives. It has its own low level tool for tape/robot diagnostics called robtest.

You can also use the hp-ux 'mc' command.

You may need to create the proper device files using mknod. Older versions required you to create a tape device file with the minor number carefully crafted to include all of highest density and hardware compression, plus non-rewind and bsd format. Later versions are ok with the AT&T driver (yuck).
For more info, read:
man 7 scsi
man 7 scsi_tape
man 7 scsi_ctl

You will need plenty (about 100Gb) of disk space to hold the netbackup catalogs. They grow rapidly over time. Create a dedicated logical volume for these at /usr/openv/netbackup/db

It greatly helps recovery times if you do a catalog backup at the end of each set of archives, to be sent off site with the other tapes. Its not absolutely required because you can do an import off the media tapes themselves, but in my experience, that alone can take 7 hours on an LTO1.

The other thing you will find with Netbackup is that Veritas expect you to write a lot of the utilities yourself, to manage day-to-day operations.
We had to write scripts as follows:
list_tapes
load_tapes
eject_tapes
veritas_stats
plus write our own scripts on each client to back up the database data (oracle/informix especially).
You will have to become proficient in the 'bpxxxxxx' utilities which come with it.
Personally I would have liked a lot more to be bundled in for an application of that price.

Lastly, Netbackup now comes with a Java (spit) client which can be used to manage a lot of the schedules and operations. Its OK on a lan, but over a 2mbit WAN its too slow to be useable, so we stick with command line.

[Vladimir Fabecic]

Hello Steve
Thank you very much for that informations.
Netbackup and its utilities is not my job (luckily). All I have to do is to prepare HP-UX for backup software. Do you want to say that I do not need special driver for library?
I have no experiance with tape libraries in HP-UX. In TRU64 no special drivers are needed.

[Steve Lewis · Accepted solution]

Since it is connected using fibre, you will need the FCD driver (for PCI-X cards) or the FCP driver (for older cards). I suggest you get the latest appropriate driver on, plus the latest patches for it, before you start with Netbackup. If you get problems, suppliers will demand thse patches before they even start to look at other things.
Our version of netbackup (v5) uses sctl and stape, no proprietary drivers required.

[Vladimir Fabecic]

Thanks