TapeTrack Documentation

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cookbook:netbackup

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NetBackup Sync Cookbook

NetBackup is Veritas's enterprise backup solution and is available for Windows, UNIX and Linux.

NetBackup Vault

NetBackup Vault is a component of NetBackup that is used to set the Vault Location field in NetBackup. It may or may not be deployed.

In the event that it is deployed TapeTrack Sync can use the Vault Location field set in NetBackup to determine the expected location of each tape volume. If Vault is not deployed, TapeTrack can determine the expected location based upon other fields such as the tape expiration date.

The expiration date value in NetBackup appears to be dynamically generated when reports are run based upon the dates of each image stored on a tape volume. For this reason, reports such as vmquery do not accurately return a valid expiry date value.

The vmquery command

The vmquery man page describes the command as:

Query the Enterprise Media Manager database, or assign and unassign volumes

To get a report that is suitable for the TapeTrack Sync command, the following minimum arguments should be used:

vmquery -W -a > Inventory.txt

Where:

  • -W sets the report to wide format with space delimiters.
  • -a tells the command to list all volumes.
While the -W argument creates a report that makes it difficult to parse date/time values because these appear to be delimited by a space, the -w argument does not produce a properly formatted report as long pool names will corrupt the formatting of the report.

Other arguments that might be required are:

  • -h which sets the EMM server and must be used to run the command against a remote host.

Post-processing

As previously noted, the -W argument produces space delimited output, but adds a space between date/time values which will be confused with space delimiters.

To fix the date/time values and convert the output into a more readable CSV format, the TMSS10SingleSpace should be used as follows:

vmquery -W -a > Inventory.txt
TMSS10SingleSpace -d "," -g "??/??/???? ??:??" < Inventory.txt > Inventory.csv

Barcodes

It is common for NetBackup barcodes to be missing the LTO L suffix, and also common for the media type field to have a HCART value that does not truly reflect the correct LTO generation.

cookbook/netbackup.1497725593.txt.gz · Last modified: 2025/01/21 22:07 (external edit)