HP does something weird

Not a big surprise when a big company roles out a product and it does something weird and all the current software that is supposed to work doesn't.

In this case it is HPs LTO 5 tape library, this the the FC connected version.
A large beast with 4 drives and 96 tape slots. Getting it all hooked up was quite straight forward, which was fortunate as there are no instructions at all anywhere.
Backup Exec sees it and you can load up the drivers etc. and all is well, you just can't do anything with the library as you can't open the doors to put tapes in or anything useful like use it.
The reason is our own fault as we have a CASO server and second backup server all hooked up through Fibre Channel to the libraries. 
Every other library we have had works fine with this set up and the MPIO software from Microsoft. But this new library won't. For some strange reason when you tell the library to Unlock it doesn't. Why, because we have two servers talking to it and it can't cope. Apparently when you right click and go unlock in Backup Exec, only the CASO tells the library to unlock, the other server doesn't so the lock stays, even if you go to the front panel you can't unlock it. What should happen is that both servers should send an unlock command.
The trick to fix this weirdness is a registry hack to disable the remote locking functionality on the server (PMR) then all is well.

This only affects environments with more than one server that connect to the library via a SAN.

Here's the link on the HP website that explains all.
http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bizsupport/TechSupport/Document.jsp?lang=en&cc=us&taskId=110&prodSeriesId=3936307&prodTypeId=12169&prodSeriesId=3936307&objectID=c02191266

This may mean that I can finally get HP's Library and Tape Tools working, whenever I have tried running them before they just hang, maybe everything will now just work.

Or perhaps they wont.....

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Scripting DNS entries

Enterprise Vault - Failed Exchange Task

Windows Phone to iPhone - a painful transition