Today, I had a rather troublesome morning. Once I got to work, Nagios was already complaining about the lin_taped on one of our TSM servers, which apparently failed due to too many SCSI resets. Additionally, I can’t login using the VE console (I can login however using SSH) so I ended up opening up a IBM Electronic Service Call (ESC+). Using SSH, I can get some information on the VE’s status: ...
Recently, we got the recommendation from our system partner to use static allocated tape cartridges instead of dynamic allocated ones. Apparently using dynamic allocating cartridges comes with a performance penalty if more than a few nodes are backing up a large amount of data at once. And yet again, I noticed that the IBM Virtualization Engine Console (aka Falconstor Software) is really error prone. In order to change the allocation type, we had to shred the old cartridges first (500 x ~100M up till now), chance the allocation type at the virtual tape library level, and then recreate the 500 cartridges with a fixed size (500x 102400MB). Now, as I was kinda optimistic, I decided to create all 500 cartridges at once. ...