R12, Device Groups and FSD

[eclidad]

Hi,

I'm still stumbling a bit getting out of the starting blocks with Arcserve R12. We have a bunch of 2 bay USB chassis. Each one has a drive for daily backups and a drive for the full backup on Friday. With R11.5 we would have four devices in GROUP0

E:\DAILY_A, E:\DAILY_B\, E:\DAILY_C, E:\DAILY_D\

and one device in GROUP1

F:\FULL\

each Monday we would stop the tape engine, swap the drives, and restart the engine. Everything worked and the world was a happy place. The behavior we see with R12 is that when you swap the drives it reconfigures your device groups. This is a problem because we set the group in the destination tab of the job.

We run one job Mon-Thu and a separate job on Fri. The monthly is a third job.

For this week I put all my dailies back into PGRP0 and my full into PGRP1. For the daily job I selected the "Use any group" button, Media is set to "*", and Media Pool is set to "DEVEL_DLY". This worked. For the Full backup I did the same thing but changed the media pool name to "DEVEL_WLY". The preflight check could not find any media to use. If I tell the full dump to use PGRP1 then the preflight check is ok.

Is there a way to get the device groups to stick when you swap your FSDs. I don't want to have to reset them every Monday. Alternatively, the rules for selecting a destination are not intuitive. What do I need to set so that my Mon-Thu dumps end up on my E: drive and the weekly on the F: drive? I would think if you set "Use any group" it would try them all before it complains. It does not appear to behave this way. Is there a difference between setting "Use any group" and having a "*" in the Group textbox?

Thanks,
- Joel

 

[davidmichel]

not directly related to the problem but if you have not done it already install update 2 for 12.0.

Put all the FSDs into the group, so when they are swapped it will already be part of the group.

On one hand you want it to use any group but on the other you don't, you want the dailies to E and weekly to F. Well then don't use any group, use the specific group you want for the job.

I think the * and use any group work the same.

 

[eclidad]

I can put all my dailies in one group and the weekly in another but as soon as I connect a new set of drives Arcserve goes and mucks with my groups. That is I can put the drives for Mon-Thu in PGRP0 and the drive for Fri in PGRP1. When I install the drives for the new week Mon - Thu go into PGRP0 - PGRP3 and Fri goes into PGRP1. One time it lumped Tue and Wed into the same PGRP. Very odd. I'll install update 2 and see if this fixes the problem.

- Joel