ignites with VPARs

[Rick Garland]

Hi all:

Running HPUX 11.11 on rp8400; 1 npar and 2 vpar. Ignite-UX C.6.8.152

Been doing some ignites. I am noticing that on some of the ignites under the filesystem tab, there have been several duplicate entries. The duplicates are name {unusedX} (where X is a number from 1-9)

I delete these entries and proceed.

Goes through and boots from the tape, makes the VGs and LVs, extend the LVs, searching for archive, found the archive, please wait while restoring from archive, then fails and says "Hmm, does not look like a tar archive" Note, this has not happened on all of the ignite tapes, but is often enough to be a concern.

I can put the tape into a system and "mt fsf 1" and "tar -tvf" and I get a list of the files from the tape.

So the question is, can I ignite an active VPAR?

[Torsten. · Accepted solution]

Hi Rick,

what is your vPars version?

The backup was supported in the early versions already, but the restore support in a vPars environment was introduced later:

"Beginning with vPars A.03.03, vPars supports tape drives. This includes recovery of a virtual partition within
a vPars environment and without using an Ignite-UX server as a boot helper."

You can ignite an active vPar.

[Rick Garland]

vpar version is A.3.03

I have 2 DDS4 tape drives - 1 each assigned to a vpar.

The make_tape_recovery completes with no errors. With this version of vpar SW, I have to down the npar and boot with /stand/vmunix and do the ignite restore to specified disks.

[Torsten.]

I don't think so. From the version 3.03 manual:

"
Archiving
=========
The process of creating an archive is the same as for non-vPars OS instances:

# make_tape_recovery -A -a /dev/rmt/1mn

Recovering
==========
To begin recovery, boot the target virtual partition using the tape drive as specified with the TAPE attribute:

winona1# vparboot -p winona2 -B TAPE

Then proceed with the recovery as normal."

So you can restore one vPar from another running vPar.

[Rick Garland]

Hmm, HP said I could do this in vpar version A.4.x but not in version A.3.x

I will try though,

Will let you know.

[IT_2007]

I had this problem before but vpar version wasn't A.3.03. But HP told me newer version support TAPE. Can you run ioscan -fnCtape and see tape for an active vpar?

You can recover vpar using ignite tape if Vpar is latest and supports TAPE (use vparstatus -v)

[Rick Garland]

I am doing an ignite restore from an ignite tape made a week later than what I wanted.

Each active vpar has a tape assigned to it.

Seems that when an ignite tape has the {unused} filesystems listed in the user interface, the restore will not work.

You will get a successful Ignite, the ignite logs do not indicate any problems, you can verify the tape, it will boot from tape, etc. - all looks good until the process starts the archive extraction. Then it fails saying "Doesn't look like a tar archive"

[Rick Garland]

Thanks for the help.

Haven't really found the answer for this yet but I am leaving this open for the time being in case somebody else has ideas.

Really strange because the 1st vpar on this system has not had any ignites with this behavior. Only the 2nd vpar.

(This vpar was created 2nd, if that makes a difference)