Re: Multiple Guested LPARS Backup Approach

So you have the simple (Carl) and the more complicated but automated (Rob) to pick from or be somewhere in between.

BRMS is the right answer for this environment especially since you already have and are using it. I believe that the library with multiple drives is also the correct answer because as Rob mentioned you can have extra tapes in there for holidays and partitions that might start overrunning one tape.

Having the library connected with fiber via a switch is also in your best interest because the drives are then connected to all partitions all the time. If you connect directly to the fiber cards or use SAS attached tape now you need to do DLPAR to move the tapes around. This introduces another whole set of challenges.

If the LPARs are truly small then you could hook the tape drives to the host partition and share them through vSCSI connections to the clients. Each could have their own or could share drives. You only need to vary off the drives when not in use. Issue here is that the clients only see a 'Drive' not a 'Library' so BRMS will be somewhat handcuffed.


- Larry "DrFranken" Bolhuis

www.frankeni.com
www.iDevCloud.com
www.iInTheCloud.com

On 7/31/2013 2:55 PM, Evan Harris wrote:

Hi All


just wondered how people were approaching the challenge of backing up
multiple guest LPARs when hosted on i.

I have a scenario where there are a few i on i partitions using BRMS as a
backup solution with a couple of single tape drives. I'm currently
exploring what options there are for backup were there more partitions, say
6 to 8 on the same machine. Clearly having multiple single tape drives
becomes "challenging", especially as BRMS won't append tapes saved on
another system.

One option is to get an autoloading drive and share it round (none of the
partitions are huge), another would be to get a library with a number of
drives.Virtual tape might even be an option though I've struggled to see
how this would solve any problems other than timing issues at the expese of
addign more storage.

I'm curious as to what others are doing and what drawbacks/advantages they
believe go with the approach they are using.

Any comments or advice welcome.