How to configure tape cleaning media for NetBackup servers

Description

DOCUMENTATION: How to configure tape cleaning media for NetBackup servers

Overview

Cleaning tapes are special tapes that provide a special function, that of cleaning the tape heads within a tape drive. They are often easily identifiable by their different color or other markings. The tape drive will automatically know that a cleaning tape has been inserted and perform a cleaning procedure that takes approximately 2-3 minutes once a cleaning tape has been inserted, and will eject the cleaning tape when complete.

Unfortunately, the library does not have eyes and cannot easily identify a cleaning tape from a regular data tape. A common practice is to use special barcode labels that identify the cleaning tape, such as "CLN001," "CLN002", etc. For libraries that do not have a barcode reader, this is not an option and manual identification of the cleaning tape is required.

Once a cleaning tape has been identified as such within NetBackup, the default behavior is for NetBackup to automatically load the cleaning tape into a tape drive when the tape drive identifies itself as needing cleaning.  The tape cleaning count is decremented as soon as the cleaning tape is selected.  When the cleaning is complete, the tape drive is marked as clean.

Creating Barcode Rules

If you are able to use barcodes such as those identified above, the simplest method to automate the cleaning is to create a barcode rule that recognizes the cleaning tape barcode and assigns it to the proper type of tape. The "CLN001" designation allows you to create a barcode rule for all tape barcodes that start with the sequence "CLN."

It is important to understand that NetBackup never puts a tape into a tape drive of differing density. For example, if your media tapes are set to type DLT, and the tape drive is set to type DLT2, the DLT tape will never be loaded into the DLT2 tape drive. Similarly, cleaning tapes have "densities" that associate themselves with a type of tape drive. For the previous example, the cleaning tape would be DLT2_CLEAN for use in DLT2 tape drives.

Cleaning tapes also must be in the special volume pool "None." They will not be successfully found if they are in any other volume pool.

Knowing these three things are all that is required to create a barcode rule that will identify and make use of all cleaning tapes that are present in a library during inventory. The command to create the barcode rule is:

vmrule -add <barcode_tag> <media_type> <pool_name> <max_mounts> "<description>"

Note: This command is located at the following location...

UNIX/Linux: /usr/openv/volmgr/bin/
Windows: install_path\Volmgr\bin\

For example, to create a barcode rule that will identify cleaning tapes for tape drives of DLT2 density, issue the following command:

vmrule -add CLN dlt2_clean None 25 "Cleaning tape"

This will assign all tapes with a barcode that starts with CLN as a DLT2 cleaning tape in the "None" volume pool, with 25 cleanings and a description of "Cleaning tape."

If the tape vendor supports the "Expired Cleaning Media" alert, the cleaning count could be set to any large number.  The "Expired Cleaning Media" alert will automatically set the cleaning count to 0 when the cleaning tape is no longer good.   Otherwise, the cleaning count should be set to the expected number of cleanings per tape.

Barcode rules do not vary from one library to another. If you have multiple physical libraries, you will need to follow the same cleaning tape barcode procedure for all of your libraries.

Implementation

Put barcodes on the cleaning tapes and insert them into the library. Once the library has finished initializing, perform a "robot inventory" in NetBackup as always. Following the inventory, you should see your new cleaning tapes in the "None" volume pool, and their density should match the density of your tape drives. (*Note - cleaning tapes must be in a standard slot that can be recognized when performing a robot inventory from within NetBackup. The cleaning media can not be in a dedicated cleaning slot reserved solely for cleaning by the library itself. Cleaning tapes should only be in dedicated cleaning slots if the administrator wishes for the library to perform drive cleaning and not NetBackup.)

If you have multiple tape drives with differing densities, you will need to create additional barcode rules to accommodate all the necessary densities. For example, you can use barcode tags that identify "CL0000" as DLT cleaning tapes, and "CN0000" as DLT2 cleaning tapes with the following commands:

vmrule -add CL dlt_clean None 25 "DLT Cleaning tape"
vmrule -add CN dlt2_clean None 25 "DLT2 Cleaning tape"