Re: Tape Duplication Question

Evan,

1st) check whether  IPLing from VTL is possible or not. Sometimes you can't because of firmware restrictions

2nd) I think you have the SAS LTO and VTL on BOX1 with AIX and only VTL on BOX2 with IBM i. Have you tried to create a tiny LPAR on BOX1 (even with temporary license) and access both devices at the same time?

I don't think you can duplicate different tape formats using any tool different to IBM i OS and DUPTAP. Maybe with same tape drives you can get any kind of trick to physically/binary duplicate, but this is not even near that case. And you want to IPL from VTL...


El 02/05/18 a las 20:12, Evan Harris escribió:

Hi

I was wondering if anyone had had any experience or thoughts with
duplicating an IBM i system save tape into a VTL using VIOS/AIX to do the
duplication.

The problem we are trying to solve:
- External Customer System with an LTO4 tape drive
- S822 with i LPARS and Fibre attached DD VTL
- SAS Attached LTO Tape drive visible to Nim/VIOS LPARs

Since the i LPARs can't access the SAS attached tape drive (can't have any
hardware) we are wondering whether it would be possible to use tcopy or a
similar utility to dupe the physical tape into the VTL and then do an ALT-D
IPL from the VTL.

Will tcopy (or some other utility) keep the tape format intact so that the
tape in the VTL is a usable, bootable copy of an IBM i Full System Save.

We have dup'd media from a physical tape drive into the VTL before using
the DUPTAP command we just don't have an i attached tape device handy at
the moment so we are exploring other options.

Any ideas on whether this is do-able or other alternatives ?