Tivoli Storage Manager 5.2 and Capacity on Demand gotcha.

A customer recently commissioned a new frame for their 3584 library and installed some new tape drives. TSM was left running under the assumption that paths and drives could be taken offline whilst work was performed on the library to ensure availability to backup to the disk storage pools.

Unfortunately this is not the case when you are commissioning additional storage slots (frames or capacity on demand).

The first indication that something was astray was that after the paths and drives online was that the the inability to check in any more tapes as the library was still showing that it was full.

The new frame allowed for over 400 more slots so this also didn’t make sense. After some thought I remembered the ’show slots’ command. After running the command I noticed that I was only being shown 704 slots rather then ther full number of slots I knew that were available.

The diagnostics and administration tool "tapeutil" showed the new and updated element range which confirmed that the configuration from an operating point of view was correct.

So the problem obviously was to do with TSM:

tsm:> show slots 3584atl

PVR slot information for library L32ATL.
Library : L32ATL
Product Id : 03584L32
Support module : 4
Mount
count : 5
Drives : 16
Slots : 704
Changers : 2
Import/Exports :
10
Device : /dev/smc0
Drive 0, element 257
Drive 1, element 258
Drive 2, element 259
Drive 3, element 260
Drive 4, element 261
Drive 5, element 262
Drive 6, element 263
Drive 7, element 264
Drive 8, element 265
Drive 9, element 266
Drive 10, element 267
Drive 11, element 268
Drive 12, element 269
Drive 13, element 270
Drive 14, element 271
Drive 15, element 272

Changer 0, element 1
Changer 1, element 2

ImpExp 0, element number 769
ImpExp 1,
element number 770
ImpExp 2, element number 771
ImpExp 3, element number
772
ImpExp 4, element number 773
ImpExp 5, element number 774
ImpExp
6, element number 775
ImpExp 7, element number 776
ImpExp 8, element
number 777
ImpExp 9, element number 778

slot element range 1025 -
1728

After some research, I discovered that the element count is only queried once upon TSM startup and it is not possible to update the this information without restarting TSM.

tsm:> show slots 3584atl

PVR slot information for library L32ATL.
Library : L32ATL
Product Id : 03584L32
Support module : 4
Mount
count : 8
Drives : 20
Slots : 1130
Changers : 2
Import/Exports :
10
Device : /dev/smc0
Drive 0, element 257
Drive 1, element 258
Drive 2, element 259
Drive 3, element 260
Drive 4, element 261
Drive 5, element 262
Drive 6, element 263
Drive 7, element 264
Drive 8, element 265
Drive 9, element 266
Drive 10, element 267
Drive 11, element 268
Drive 12, element 269
Drive 13, element 270
Drive 14, element 271
Drive 15, element 272
Drive 16, element 273
Drive 17, element 274
Drive 18, element 275
Drive 19, element 276

Changer 0, element 1
Changer 1, element 2

ImpExp 0, element
number 769
ImpExp 1, element number 770
ImpExp 2, element number 771
ImpExp 3, element number 772
ImpExp 4, element number 773
ImpExp 5,
element number 774
ImpExp 6, element number 775
ImpExp 7, element number
776
ImpExp 8, element number 777
ImpExp 9, element number 778

slot element range 1025 - 2154