Within TSM (or nowadays known as IBM Spectrum Protect), filespaces may exist that are no longer backed up. These are file systems that were once backed up, but are no longer backed anymore.
This may occur if someone deletes a file system from a client, and thus it is no longer backed up. Or a file system was added to the exclude list, so it's no longer included in any backup runs.
These old filespaces may use up quite some storage, and because they're never being backed up anymore, their data remains on the TSM server for restore purposes.
It's good practice to review these filespaces and to determine if they can be deleted from TSM to free up storage space. And thus it's a good idea to put this in a script, and have that script run from time to time automatically, for example by scheduling it in the crontab on a weekly or monthly basis.
Here's a sample script. You can run it on your AIX TSM server. It assumes you have a "readonly" user account configured within TSM, with a password of "readonly". It will send out an email if any obsolete filespace are present. You have to update the email variable at the beginning of the script to whatever email address you want to send an email.
#!/bin/ksh
email="my@emailaddress.com"
y=$(perl -MPOSIX -le 'print strftime "%D",localtime(time-(60*60*24))')
mytempfile=/tmp/myadmintempfile.$$
rm -f ${mytempfile}
dsmadmc -comma -id=readonly -password=readonly q filespace \* \* f=d | \
grep -v $(date +"%m/%d/%y") | grep -v "${y}" | grep ",," > ${mytempfile}
if [ -s ${mytempfile} ] ; then
cat ${mytempfile} | mailx -s "Filespaces not backed up during last 24 \
hours." ${email} >/dev/null 2>&1
fi
rm -f ${mytempfile}
exit 0
The script will send an email with a list of any filespaces not backed in the last 24 hours, if any are found.
The next thing you'll have to do is to investigate why the file system is not backed up. If you've determined that the filespace is no longer required in TSM, then you can move forward by deleting the filespace from TSM.
For example, for a UNIX file system:
delete filespace hostname /file/systemFor file systems of Windows clients, deleting a filespace may be a bit more challenging. TSM might not allow you to remove a filespace and exit with an error message like "No matching file space found".
You might attempt to delete the filespace like this:
delete filespace nodename \\nodename\d$ nametype=uniOr, you can remove Windows filespaces in TSM by filespace number. In that case, first list the known filespaces in TSM of a specific nodename, for example:
q filespace nodename *This will list all the filespaces known in TSM for host "nodename". Replace nodename with whatever client you're searching for. In the output you'll see the hostanme, the filespace name, and a filespace number, for example, 1.
To delete filespace with filespace number "1" for host "nodename", you can run:
delete filespace nodename 1 nametype=fsid
Topics: Backup & restore, Spectrum Protect↑
Spectrum Protect / TSM: Display deduplicaton bytes pending removal
There are numerous show commands available for IBM Spectrum Protect / TSM, that will display information about the environment. Many of them aren't as well documented, probably because IBM intends to use these commands for their own support.
Quite a lot of these commands have been documented by Spectrum Protec / TSM users, and an example can be found on the following web site: http://www.mm-it.at/de/TSM_Show_Commands.html.
A very interesting show command, that can be used to display the amount of deduplicate bytes pending removal, is the following command:
tsm: TSM>show deduppending file_diskThe command above shows the number of byes for storage pool "FILE_DISK" still to be removed by the dedupe processes.
ANR1015I Storage pool FILE_DISK has 7,733,543,532,121 duplicate bytes pending removal.
The command may take quite some time to run, up to 10 minutes, so please be patient when issuing this command.
An easy command to check on the Spectrum Protect / TSM server what the backup status of all the Spectrum Protect / TSM clients is using the "q event" command. For example:
q event * * begind=-1 begint=09:00 endd=today endt=09:00The command above will display the status of all the backups jobs in the last 24 hours between 9 AM yesterday and 9 AM today.
To register a new TSM / IBM Spectrum Protect administrator, run:
register admin adminname password contact="Contact details of the new admin" emailaddress=email-address@ofthenewadmin.comNext, grant system privilege authority to the new admin:
grant authority adminname class=sysTo remove a TSM admin, run:
remove admin adminname
Topics: Backup & restore, Spectrum Protect↑
Show configuration of a TSM / IBM Spectrum Protect server
To save the complete configuration of a TSM server to a file, run:
dsmadmc -id=admin -password=admin show config > /tmp/configThis assumes that you have an admin account with the password admin. And it will write the output file to /tmp/config.
If you wish to have comma separated output, add -comma.
To just display the status of the TSM / IBM Spectrum Protect server, run (this is included in the output of show config):
q statusAnother very interesting command to run is:
q system
The following command can be used to tail the TSM / IBM Spectrum Protect console log:
dsmadmc -consoleThis will allow you to continously follow what is happening on the TSM / IBM Spectrum Protect server.
Topics: Backup & restore, Spectrum Protect↑
Start a backup from the TSM / IBM Spectrum Protect server
There is a way to start a backup from the TSM / IBM Spectrum Protect server itself, and that is by defining a client action. For example, to start an incremental backup on a node, run:
define clientactionYou can use wild cards like * in the node name, for example:action=incremental
def clienta node* act=iYou can monitor the schedule event, using the following command:
q ev * @1You may cancel this schedule, by running:
delete schedule [policy domain] @1
How do you test if Oracle TDP (RMAN) is working properly?
# tdpoconf showenv
If you need to exclude a specific file system from the TSM backup, than you would add the following line to the dsm.sys file:
DOMAIN ALL-LOCAL -/opt/archiveThis examples will avoid backing up file system /opt/archive.
Now, what if you wish to exclude a certain directory within a file system from the backup:
Create the following enty in the dsm.sys file:
INCLExcl /usr/tivoli/tsm/client/ba/bin/inclexclThen create the inclexcl file and add the following line:
Exclude.dir /opt/archive/tmpThis will only exclude the tmp folder in file system /opt/archive.
You can check with the following command:
# dsmc q inclexcl
If you have a TSM database spread across mutliple database volumes on disk, be very careful on how you use them. It is best to assign multiple database volumes on different disks, all equal in size. This way, TSM is able to use the
performance of several disks equally.
Also, take a look at the assigned capacity of the TSM database. It might well be that not the full capacity of the database is assigned to TSM; this way, some database volumes are more heavily used than other. A good command to check if the database volumes are equally used is "q dbspace":
q dbspaceThese commands can be used to find out, how your database capacity is assigned. If it isn't fully assigned, then do it now.
q db f=d
Check the output of the TSM commands with the location of your database volumes on the operating system, to see if the database volumes are equally spread across multiple disks. The AIX commands iostat and vmstat will give you a good idea if your disks are used equally.
