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Someone on my team wanted to try to add a new Tape Library to the environment using Command Center.  I had never done this in Command Center before, so I watched the user go through the steps.  

We found that it had created the library and the storage pools.  But we could not find any way to create barcode patterns or to create another scratch pool from the Command Center.

We are an MSP and this is an essential step in being able to use the library.

We then tried to create the barcode patterns and other scratch pools from the CommCell Console.  We created the entities but then found we could not associate it to the pool/plan.

It appears that the option to change the scratch pool is greyed out in this case.

Is it expected that you cannot edit the scratch pool when the library/storage policy/plan is created from the Command Center?  Or are we missing something here?

Furthermore I was expecting a much more user-friendly approach to adding tape to the environment.  For example, the user had to struggle through clicking the buttons on the page rather than going through a wizard-like flow, where we would be asked necessary info - like barcode patterns, what scratch pool to use, how many cleaning tapes do you have (so that you don’t get alerts that there are no cleaning tapes, etc).  Are there plans to make this easier in the Command Center, or are we the only ones left in the world who still have tape libraries to configure? :-)

Hey @RobAbate , hope all is well!

I spoke to several of our MM folks and the consensus is that this feature should be available, though isn’t working as expected.

They unanimously suggested creating a support case so dev can address this directly.  You’re definitely not the last person to still use tape 😂

Can you share the case number here, once created so I can track it?

Thanks!

Thanks Mike!

I’m a bit confused here as now I’m looking at the setup and I can see that the scratch pool is not greyed out (both library level and storage pool properties, storage pool copy). I’m wondering if I got “F5’d” when we created the barcode patterns and subsequent scratch pools, and it was greyed out because we didn’t hit F5 in the GUI after creating these entities.

There have also been a lot of other admins playing around in this environment so I’m not sure if they did something to get this working. I’m running audit trails to see if I can follow along with the sequence of events.

So I’m not sure if I should open the TR here, or if we should open an MR to be able to have an “Add Tape Library” wizard that would accommodate all of these other options that you currently can’t set from the command center.

Another thing I realized is that the multiplexing factor on that auto-created Primary_Global Pool seems to have a multiplexing factor of 25 (when we know that even the docs recommend never setting it higher than 5). We actually ran into an issue at a DR test when it turned out that the mutliplexing factor of 25 made it impossible for us to complete the restores on time due to the amount of time spent seeking through the tape. So I guess a TR should be opened to address this, at least.

I went ahead and opened case 221018-791, as I’ve been trying to reproduce the multiplexing factor issue and was unable to get change control approved to create a new copy as a test.  So hopefully we can look at all of these things under this TR as I’ve uploaded the DB for staging along with the logs.

Thanks for the case number!

I see that some CMRs were created for your ideas, which is great.

I’ll update this thread with the CMR numbers for anyone else who is interested.

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