Wednesday, April 08, 2015

TSM 7.1 Discussion

I was asked by a former colleague to start a discussion on the merits of TSM 7.1. I use TSM 7.1 currently on my newer TSM servers and don't see a huge difference from our 6.4 servers. I know there are some features and updates with 7.1 but none that impact me other than any possible performance enhancements.

So tell me why you upgraded to TSM 7.1 or what features made it a "No Brainer" for you to implement 7.1. I'd like to hear from you.

Q MOUNT Research

So in yesterday's post I spoke of a "better Q MOUNT" using a script I wrote. The problem is the Q MOUNT command does not reference a accessible TSM table. It appears to gathers the information on the mount with the associated process or session from various tables (as seen with Q MOUNT F=D). So I became more intrigued with how TSM gathers the info and decided to bypass TSM all together and research on the DB2 side. Well out of 779 tables in the TSM 7.1 DB2 database I did not see any with MOUNT in the name (you can find a list of all the TSM DB 7.1 tables here). There definietle some tables that appear in the list that are hidden from TSM or unused, but I queried a number of tables looking for any that had fields (columns) that correlated to the Q MOUNT command. The closest I came was the MMS_DRIVE table which has the following fields.

$ db2 "select char(COLNAME,24) as COLNAME,char(TYPENAME,24)as DATATYPE,LENGTH,SCALE from syscat.columns where tabname='MMS_DRIVES' and tabschema='TSMDB1'"

COLNAME                  DATATYPE                 LENGTH      SCALE
------------------------ ------------------------ ----------- ------
ACSDRVID                 VARCHAR                          126      0
CLEANFREQ                INTEGER                            4      0
DEVICE                   VARCHAR                           65      0
DEVTYPE                  INTEGER                            4      0
DEV_INQ                  SMALLINT                           2      0
DRIVENAME                VARCHAR                           31      0
ELEMENT                  INTEGER                            4      0
INQUIRY                  VARCHAR                         1025      0
KBYTES_PROC              BIGINT                             8      0
KBYTES_PROC_HI           INTEGER                            4      0
LIBNAME                  VARCHAR                           31      0
ONLINE                   INTEGER                            4      0
OWNER                    VARCHAR                           65      0
OWNERVOL                 VARCHAR                         1025      0
RD_FORMAT                BIGINT                             8      0
SERIAL                   VARCHAR                           65      0
UPDATE_DATE              TIMESTAMP                         10      6
UPDATOR                  VARCHAR                           65      0
WR_FORMAT                BIGINT                             8      0
WWN                      VARCHAR                           17      0


There should be a table that would show the drive, what tape is mounted, what process or session it's assigned and who owns it, just like a Q MOUNT F=D. I haven't found it yet.

NOTE: Of the 779 tables I listed a more refined search shows 154 tables that correspond to what we seem to be able to access from the TSM admin command line.