Tivoli User Community

I had the opportunity this week to attend the Arizona Tivoli User Group and gain some valuable information on TSM Fastback, TSM 6.1, and Tivoli Storage Virtualization Management. They covered these products in the morning session and had a hands on demonstration of TSM 6.1 Admin interface and reporting features in the afternoon. What was even better was they offered a free certification exam so I got caught up on my TSM certification. Not every group will be able to afford free certifications, but it is definitely worth your time to check out your local or regional group for contacts and information. To find the Tivoli User Group in your are check out the Global Tivoli User Community website. If there is no group within your area you can still join the global group and attend webinars and participate in online activities.

Free Tivoli Web Based Training

If you are not aware of it, there is some good FREE web based training from Tivoli here. Also if you cannot afford, or take the time, for the regular class training they do have some decent low cost web based training for TSM and CDP (Continuous Data Protection) listed on the site also. Now it's not as thorough as the classroom training but if you have never used TSM it's a good start.

New TSM administration

I use a small PERL script which helps me to administrate my TSM servers.

What do you use or need when you administrate your TSM servers?

Split TSM servers (same platform)

One of our customers has a TSM sevrer with a very big TSM database (100G) and wants to split this big TSM server database into two TSM servers.

The plan is to install a new TSM server instance and load this big TSM database into this new instance. We want to separate these two TSM servers in the following way: we would delete those nodes from the original TSM server that we would keep in the new/another instance and vica versa based on the storage pool usage (means keep/delete whole storage pools on TSM servers).

/* The new instance will be a library client of the original TSM server which will be a library manager. */

What do you think of it? Will it work or not?

ACSLS Not Really Ready For Library Sharing!

So we have a large ACSLS library at one of our data centers and we decided to use library sharing with 5.3. Tivoli stated that in 5.3 ACSLS is now supported in a library sharing environment. So we setup library sharing and proceeded to also setup DRM to handle our offsite tape rotation. Now I have used IBM equipment almost exclusively when I was with IBM so this ACSLS stuff is new to me, so when MOVE DRMEDIA did not seem to be working I immediately thought it was an ACSLS issue. The problem was that when we ran a MOVE DRMEDIA the library would only checkout one tape at a time. We have two 40 tape I/O doors so why it would only check out one tape at a time was puzzling(it would wait until the tape was removed from the I/O door before checking out the next tape). So I called Sun/STK and was told it was a software issue. So when I called Tivoli it took days before someone found the issue was in fact TSM. The APAR is IC45537 which states that TSM library clients do not currently support the concurrent checkout of multiple volumes. There was a local work around which entailed using MOVE DRMEDIA REMOVE=NO from the library client, checking them back in on the library controller, and then checking them out on the library controller. It's a mess of a script but it works. This APAR was released in April of 2005 yet I am still having to use a local work around. It just drives me nuts! Especially because the problem was not one that even Tivoli support easily found. Let's hope there is an actual fix in 5.4 but I'm not betting on it.