IBM Tivoli Backup Software

[McChikenhanger]

Hi boys and girls,

 

Just reaching out to anyone out there with experience in using IBM's Tivoli Storage Manager backup software. At my new job here they use it for backups, but only the old guy that I replaced new how to use it, and unfortunately I never got to meet him or read any notes (I don't think he left any). I've been playing around with it, and I've go it backing up clients to Disk Storage Pools with no problems.

 

However, the bit that I am struggling with, is getting it to use a VTL (Virtual Tape Libraries) as if it had a physical tape drive plugged into it. Now I've go it to recognize the tape drive, and it sees the tapes, I can checkin the tapes to the Libvolume and I can display them all with their names via command line. However the software just won't let me use them or by the looks of it AutoMount them so that I can store backup jobs to them.

 

I've linked a Storage Pool to the Tape Drive, but this always displays it with a message of "No Capacity". So does anybody know what I am doing wrong that the system won't be able to read the free space from the tapes, even when it knows that they are there?

 

I have run checkout libvolum and audited the volume, to see if this will fix the issue, but now it's not even allowing me to checkin the tapes to the libvolume again.

 

 

Any help will be much appreciated. I think I'm losing my hair now.

[mjk]

Wow you guys must be rolling in it to afford that!

I tinkered with Tivoli for O/S deployment but sadly cannot help with the backup side (we just couldn't afford it, it's really an enterprise solution and not many schools would use it )

What I can say is that the documentation and IBM support is second to none and this is where you should start:

https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/community/wikis/home?lang=en#!/wiki/Tivoli%20Documentation%20Central/page/Tivoli%20Documentation%20Central

[McChikenhanger]

Well, don't know how much longer this will be here at this rate. I have used Windows Backup, Backup Exec, VEEAM, and DPM in the past and they are all a heck of a lot easier to use than this Tivoli thing. Maybe someone saw the IBM brand on it and thought it would be good.

 

Thank you MJK for the documentation site. I will look through it there, although I have been browsing the IBM's webpages for the past few days. Oh and we've got no support with IBM.