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We have an old physical media agent doing Aux Copies AND writing tapes every month.  When tape jobs start for this media agent, the throughput of the aux copies suffers greatly as the CPU goes to 100% and stays there until tapes finish (might be 10+ days). We wanted to see if we could easily offload the “tape writing” jobs as we have a newer (but not very powerful) physical system we could repurpose.  This would entail installing a new physical media agent in the rack, adding SCSI HBA’s to it and connecting them to the tape drives.  Are there any “gotchas” when setting up a new media agent for tape jobs (either special physical hardware considerations, or software/config gotchas, or guides I should be looking at)?  I haven’t set a media agent up (especially doing tapes) and this is a that was maintained by a person who is no longer working with us.

 

Also: We’re using LTO7 M8 tapes with LTO8 drives.

Nothing comes to mind.  The Media Agent software is just there to facilitate connection to the library by means of the hardware vendor’s configuration.

Any tweaking or fine tuning would generally be within the library config itself.

On the Media Agent side (as well as the Storage Policy config) you’d want to make sure you have the right number of streams, etc. configured.

Check this document out for a full overview of stream allocation:

https://documentation.commvault.com/11.24/expert/10969_streams_overview.html


Thanks! I’m a little familiar with the streams limitations/configs for tapes (recently went through reading and reconfiguring some) but have yet to manually “start from scratch” set up a new media agent, and “for tapes” seemed like it would be more complicated than a vanilla install/setup :)