Windows Admins & VSS

I've been running into a number of Windows Admins lately who are not familiar with the Microsoft Volume Shadow Copy Service. I guess you have to be an admin who works with backups to have any familiarity with it??? Is this common?  If you have admins who seem to lack knowledge of VSS I would recommend the following MS TechNet library reference. Lately I've been dealing with the object enumeration and missing system writer issues, if anyone has found a solution for the object enumeration issue I'm all ears!!!

TSM v6.x

I'm curious to find out your opinion about the TSM v6 published a few years ago.

Do you use v6 at all, are you afraid to use it? what about deduplication or simple you are just satisfied with v5?

And of course what about the ITM and ISC/AC/TIP whatever this is called?

I'm really interested in your view!

Cheers.

/* I opened the same topic at: adsm.org. */

tsmadm.pl

This is to let you know tsmadm.pl v1beta RC2 has been published.

In brief, this program will make your daily TSM work easier by using the entire terminal size with colors and by redefining the existing commands or by extending the original ones.

In addition, the program can handle historical/archive data as well!!!

See details at: tsmadm.pl

Will you try it and send us your experiences or suggestions?

You can also contact us via several other ways:

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TSM Symposium 2011

Don't forget: TSM Symposium 2011: http://tsm2011.uni-koeln.de/
( 27th-30th September 2011 at the Hilton Hotel, Dresden )

What Problem? It's Working As Designed!

When upgrading from TSM 5.x to 6.x you have probably found that your select queries don't return in table format but in list format. You ask yourself, "WTH is going on here?" First off don't complain to IBM, it's "working as designed." You see with the change of the TSM DB to DB2 many of table column widths have changed. To have your select statements return in table format IBM states that you should use the CAST function on certain (if not all) columns. Otherwise, the best alternative is to save the results in commadelimited format and open the data in Excel. Here's the APAR??? that states it's not a problem. To quote Lady Gaga, TSM 6.x was "Born This Way!"

NOTE: Is it me or does IBM's last example leave one scratching their head wondering how using cast helped???

Memory Efficient Backup

I have come across a few servers that have memory issues when backing up large drives / filesystems and using MEMORYEFFICIENTBACKUP was not resolving the backup failures. The error code I would see was

ANS1030E The operating system refused a TSM request for memory allocation.

The problem was one drive that has millions of small files all under one directory. It's one of those poorly devised custom programs, and I've seen it a hundred times.  I could journal the drive, but we seemed to get better results with an alternative method.  A coworker reminded me of the INCLUDE.FS option using DISKCACHE and specifying the cache location.

INCLUDE.FS G: MEMORYEFFICIENTBACKUP=DISKCACHEMETHOD DISKCACHELOCATION=L:\TSM_cache

With the include.fs TSM will only use the memoryefficientbackup diskcache method for that particular drive, allowing the rest of the backup to perform normally. So if you have a drive or filesystem with millions of files this is an alternative to journaling.